Moonsalt
by Zenthisoror
Summary: A meteorite falls, a strange tower grows in Tokyo Bay, and young people start turning into pillars of salt. As salt blight enters the world of the Kira investigation, L can only watch. (Canon divergence, salt blight premise from Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro, no knowledge of Shio no Machi expected)
1. Salt Fall

**Disclaimer: The characters are the properties of the Death Note franchise and the concept of salt blight, the meteorite fall in Tokyo Bay, the tower and Salt Fall are from Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro.**

 **Author's Note: Hello! Zen is here again with another stressbuster...I've been reading Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro and aside from being an eerie, poignant and very fun read (I hope it gets an English translation soon, or else I might just do it myself) it gave me a really strange drive to write a crystallisation scene of all things, so here I am inserting the salt blight premise into Death Note, satisfying that writing itch.**

 **This is a bit of an odd story. I'm hoping it captures the slightly eerie feel of Shio no Machi. It's been suggested to me that this might count as body horror but we'll have to see.**

 **Without further ado, I hope you enjoy Part 1. This will be a two-parter! Best, Zen :D**

* * *

A part of L would later say that nobody was responsible for what happened to Light but Light himself.

That Light had, somehow, engineered all of this, in that same meticulously perfect way he engineered every part of his perfect life - including, L maintained, the rise then escape of Kira.

After all, if Light hadn't insisted on opening the curtains they wouldn't have seen the meteorite falling into the Tokyo Bay. Light had sealed his own fate through his ridiculous assertions that they both needed to get more sunlight, that it was morning, that they had worked through the night, and that, despite what L might think of it, Light valued his circadian rhythm, thank you very much.

L was being childish but he had never pretended to be otherwise, and something about being able to blame one man's actions, one man's errors, and a human being that was comforting in the face of the alien, the inexplicable and the slow disintegration of the world he had known.

Yes, Light should definitely shoulder part of the blame.

The other part of the blame was a long dark corridor that L didn't dare walk down, because thinking about it never gave him any answers, which meant that it was endless and therein down an endless, spiraling corridor madness lay (he was not to pursue it).

He knew the truth, of course. There was nobody to blame but the salt blight and the strange forces Salt Fall had unleashed it upon the nation. Once the blight had struck there was nothing L could have done - nothing any of them could have done - to stop it, especially in those early days after Salt Fall.

Rain washed down the window in a thick blue-grey sheet. He watched it flow down the road, swirl through road grit – salt – and wash it down a storm drain.

And yet he wondered.

Watari called it survivor's guilt. It was an odd phrase. Surviving had never occurred to L to be a crime. It wasn't an injustice that needed to be brought to book, and he wasn't convinced that, whatever this feeling - of emptiness, of transparency, as if he had suddenly become a very surprised and sad glass jar – was, it couldn't be better described simply as losing, even if he wasn't entirely sure what it was he had lost.

Sometimes the feeling gnawed at him, as if a grain of salt had lodged in his thoughts and started slowly crystallising the corners of his mind and he said as much to Watari when he thought the man would tolerate hearing it (again).

Watari told him that it was only human that L should think that way, and for a sour moment L would entertain the thought of what it would be like not to be human at all, but to be cold, ordered and regular as a column of crystal, if only for a moment of peace.

"It's alright to be scared, Light. It's only human."

Those times, L would go and stand before the remains of Yagami Light. He had been covered in a sheet and tucked into the corner of the room as if in anticipation of a miracle (L knew better than to believe in miracles), and L would lift the edges of the sheet to look at that face one more time.

It was usually enough to shock L back to his senses.

* * *

When the light cleared there was a new shape on the Tokyo skyline.

Tall, white and slanting like the streak of tear, a spire of crystal reared over the rooftops of Tokyo Bay. It was tapered to a jagged point. It radiated a cold, blue, belligerent glow like moonlight but from no moon that had ever shone on Earth and reminded L of a broadcasting tower.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as if to the pull of a strange gravity. L closed his eyes, blinked away spots. "The news."

Light tore his eyes away from the spire. "What do you reckon it is?"

"Newsworthy, hence the news, and, at the present, also a distraction from our main task, so we'll satisfy our curiosity - then move swiftly on."

The task force had not arrived yet and likely wouldn't start trailing in for another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, L had thought, would be adequate time to grasp the situation in Tokyo Bay. Then he could turn his attention back to the problem of Kira and forget, at least for the day, about the tall white spire glinting in the distance between the skyscrapers.

"Ryuuzaki."

He kicked off from his desk and drifted his chair to see the news-stream running on Light's screen.

"…one of many that have fallen across the whole of Japan. While we await a statement from the IAU as to how they failed to predict this meteorite shower, Hanaoka Announcer is at Yahagi Gakuen High School with our breaking news story."

The footage switched to a woman in a tasteful suit, standing in front of a pair of school gates with the crystal spire of Tokyo Bay glinting tall in the background, looming over the buildings, and between her and the gates was a mass of figures. They were students, arriving for the morning, and not one of the students was moving.

They were frozen, still, caught as if in slow motion in the middle walking, talking, gesticulating, with bags slung over shoulders, thumbs on phones, hands bent in a half-toss as a ball was thrown between friends, and as the news reporter spoke, the camera moved in closer and L heard Light's breath snag in his throat.

The students' faces gleamed. Their hair, their skin, their eyes, their fingers shimmered with a cold blue-white glow in the sunlight, and where most had frozen with eyes squinted shut as if against a camera flash, some students' gazes were wide and stretched with terror and their mouths stopped in screams, hands half-risen to their temples as though they had tried to cover their faces.

"…it is yet unknown whether there is any link between this event and the meteorite but eye-witness accounts suggest that this incident here occurred at the same time as the impact of the meteorite on the artificial island under construction in Tokyo Bay. Inoue-san, if you could tell us again what you told us earlier - "

The camera swung to an old man with a cock-eyed spitz dog. A microphone was thrust into his face. L listened only half-heartedly as the reporter had him regurgitate his morning and scanned the students in the background again.

They were made of the same crystal as the tower in Tokyo Bay.

He glanced up and met Light's gaze. Light nodded, mouthed, "No doubt about it."

"...and then there was this great flash of light - like they say they saw with them bombs in the war! - a great white flash, and when it was gone, they were all like this." He gestured at the students, a trembling hand-sweep. "Not one of them moving. I thought they had all turned to stone! But they aren't stone. They might as well be, but stone they aren't."

"What have they become?"

The old man hesitated then to L's astonishment and Light's disgust he shuffled up to the nearest student-statue, licked his thumb, swept it against a hand being waved in a high-five then touched it to his mouth.

"Salt," he said at length, as the reporter hung back and watched from a stunned distance. "It tastes like table salt."

"There's more," said Light, clicking around the screen. Videos from different news channels were playing on different windows alongside an NHK live update feed. "Another twenty one schools reporting the same thing as at Yahagi Gakuen – it's mainly reports from Tokyo Bay area at the moment, but it's all the same: Every student outside at the time of impact - crystallising in an instant."

"The light," said L, remembering the white flash that had blinded him the moment Light had dragged open the curtains.

"Anybody of school age caught directly in the light." Light shuddered and L didn't need to hear it aloud to know what Light was thinking. Perhaps the only thing that had saved Light from the same fate as the students at the gates of Yahagi Gakuen was the pane of double-glazed glass in the window. "The ones on buses and trains and those that had just got indoors weren't affected, but people have been finding more 'mysterious salt sculptures of students' everywhere, all over Japan..."

He suddenly started and surged to his feet. "I need to use a phone."

"To call whom exactly?" At Light's expression L conceded that perhaps now wasn't a good time to be deliberately dense. "Your sister. Of course. Yes."

Light called Sayu's mobile first. He drummed his fingers on the table-top, tried to remember her school route. She took a bus to a private middle school. Today was a Wednesday. Wednesdays, like Mondays and Fridays, she had morning circuits with the rest of the volleyball ought to have taken an earlier bus.

"The chances that your sister was indoors at the time of the impact are eighty four percent." L stood quietly to Light's side, digging his hands into his pockets. The cuffs jangled. "Light-kun shouldn't worry so much."

"You and I both know, Ryuuzaki, that wherever those numbers are coming from, they're not coming from anywhere with any habit of honesty."

Sayu was busy.

Light threw down the phone and tried their home number.

Busy as well.

"The most reasonable explanation would be that your mother thought to call your sister just before Light-kun did." L watched Light pace back and forth, stalking between the limits of the chain. The cuff slid up and down L's wrist and it hurt but he didn't say a word. "I should imagine it is quite unusual for anybody to think faster than Light-kun, but given Light-kun's circumstances perhaps it isn't surprising that thoughts concerning his family's safety came second to his own. He has, after all, been doing all that he can to protect his own skin for the past few months in an environment that has detached him from his family - "

"Not another word, Ryuuzaki, if you know what's good for you. Mum?" L pricked his ears but it turned out to be the answering machine. "It's Light. I saw the news and I want to know if Sayu's safe. Call back this number - " When L looked as if he wanted to protest Light ignored him. "- and leave me a message. Please – and I'm fine. There's no need to worry about me. I wasn't outside."

Light lowered the phone. He breathed, slow and deep, as if to taste the air and savour it seeping into his lungs, taking a moment reassure himself that his body wasn't crystal like the students in the streets.

He returned the handset to Watari and the old man took the phone with a gentle pat to Light's shoulder.

L pulled the thumb from his mouth. "Just in case Light-kun is having any difficulties remembering the priorities of the day, I should like to remind him that the Kira investigation will continue as per usual."

"Ryuuzaki, even Matsuda would be able to see that, right now, there is a bigger case out there than Kira - "

"Maybe so, Light-kun, but as I have been contacted about neither the meteorite nor the children, none of this is our case to be concerned with."

"But - "

"Kira, however, is our case, and Kira may make use of this incident as a prime opportunity to further his own agenda. Whilst the rest of the world may be distracted, we cannot afford to be."

"What happened out there -" Light pointed at the city beyond the window. His finger trembled, " - may be a mass murder brought about by a weapon unknown and beyond human knowledge and you are expecting me to believe that you don't have any interest in investigating the perpetrators at all?"

"That would be assuming that there are any perpetrators to the start with. On the contrary, Light-kun. Considering the similarities to the Kira case, I am very much interested. However - "

"This isn't about the Kira case, at all." Light's eyes burned. "This is about you. You're just trying not to think about what's happening. You want to have an excuse to run and hide, so that when somebody comes to you for help you can tell them that you're busy with the Kira case and close the door in their face!"

"Supernatural mass crystallisation triggers are not my area of expertise or anything that fits even remotely within my line of work. I am a detective, Light, not a scientist," L jammed his hands into his pockets and gripped the fabric of the lining, "and unless there is a doctorate in advanced inorganic chemistry tucked somewhere about your person, there is nothing that you or I can do about a pillar of salt one kilometre high in Tokyo Bay that'll be satisfactory to anybody. As much as it pains me to say to it, in this situation, we are both powerless, which is something I have accepted and included as a realistic factor in my decisions - and you would do well to accept in turn."

For a long moment Light studied him with a sharp, sharp gaze that made L feel as if he was being re-examined, re-assessed, and the childish part of him stirred with ugly resentment that his prime suspect of all people would dare to do that.

Light snorted and looked out of the window. "It's not like you to admit defeat."

"It was never our game to win or lose to start with. Investigating that tower is none of our business." L hopped into his chair and turned on his array of monitors. "Catching Kira, however, is, and meteorite or no meteorite I intend to bring him to justice. Light-kun ought to wish the same unless," a sideways glance he knew that Light wouldn't miss, "he somehow benefits from hindering this investigation?"

Light coloured and hurried to take up his usual seat. "Of course, I don't!"

He dropped into his chair and began closing the video feeds of the breaking news, returning the screen to where he had left off his work before sleep.

There. Everything as per usual.

L settled back and was about to comfortably snap open the first of the day's biscuit packets when Light muttered, "You just want to avoid thinking about the possibilities of the supernatural."

L closed his eyes, opened them, then very deliberately swivelled his chair until he was facing Light again. "Well, since Light-kun is in the spirit of discussing the supernatural why don't we begin with 'divine punishment'? Kira is undoubtedly familiar with the concept, so what about Light?"

"'What about Light' indeed," Light ground out before his swinging fist collided with L's face.

And despite what the media came to dub the Salt Fall, after the rest of the task force arrived and helped untangle the chain from between their chairs, everything, for a time being, continued as normally as it could in the extraordinary circumstances.

Souichirou, Aizawa and Mogi had quickly agreed with L. No use thinking about a problem they had none of the expertise or equipment to solve. Misa had gone to sleep late and slept through the impact, her curtains thick enough to block out the light, and L had left it to Light to explain what had happened and console her through the initial disbelief, horror then cold tears of shock as she absorbed the images on the news footage Watari allowed her to see on a laptop.

"Aliens!" she cried, throwing her arms about Light's neck. "It's got to be aliens! Why don't they destroy that tower? All of those kids! All of those young and happy and beautiful boys and girls! It did that to them! That thing turned them into salt, I know it did!"

"They haven't proved a link between the Salt Fall and the crystallisation yet, Misa."

"We don't need proof. We just need to get rid of it." She sniffed. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot. "Everybody knows that that horrible crystal-tower-thing did it. Don't you think so, Light?"

"Yes, justice would be much swifter if only we could enact it without gathering the evidence and necessary information beforehand to make sure it's an informed decision," said L dryly, stirring the sugar paste at the bottom of his teacup. "I'm sure Kira would approve."

Light glowered over Misa's head and, as L had gleefully predicted, opened his mouth to snatch the bait.

L sipped his tea and marvelled at how resilient people's habits and routines could be in the face of extraordinary change, and when they closed the curtains over the windows for the night he tried to take comfort in that fact (and failed).

* * *

In the evening there was a message from Yagami Sachiko on the answering machine. Watari brought the phone to Light, and as he stripped another banana and added its skin to a pyramid he was constructing L pretended not to listen but, in fact, found himself leaning slightly towards the other desk.

Sayu was fine. Light let out a breath of relief – fine, if not more than a little shaken. One of her teammates had stepped outside to wash her face under a tap and been caught in the impact flash. By the time they found the girl's statue half of her face had crumbled into blue-white chunks of salt into the washbasin.

School had been cancelled for a day over the crisis and Sayu had been home before lunch.

Sachiko added that Sayu had been very relieved to hear Light over the phone and that, whatever the circumstances were, Light was welcome to return whenever he was ready to do so.

* * *

The following morning there were curious additions to the information – or 'speculation' as L insisted it be called – that had been gathered about the crystallisation phenomenon.

A nineteen year old boy who had been held back in high school had come forward as the sole survivor of his football club, who had been out jogging pre-lessons. He had turned nineteen only the previous day.

A newborn baby had crystallised in its mother's arms when its older sister had opened the hospital room window to let in the sun.

The cut off point of those affected by the crystallisation was eighteen years old. The cut off point was so sharp that a university student who had turned nineteen only moments before Salt Fall was left unscathed.

It was remarkable, unsettling and from whatever angle L could consider it, alarmingly deliberate.

"Sounds as if Light was kind of lucky to be cooped up here with Ryuuzaki! If he'd still been going to university he would've been on his way to morning lectures like all of those other kids," Matsuda seemed to repeat with every macabre story that the news uncovered from Salt Fall, following it with a nervous laugh that tended to drop the task force into a fraught, uneasy silence once it was gone.

It was less than ideal. The Kira investigation was distracted. L found himself eating through an entire packet of koalas in his frustration but he couldn't blame any of them either. In the dark of the night he sometimes thought he could still feel that strange, electric prickling, that shadowy itch in his skin, like the tug of an alien moon, that he had felt on the day of Salt Fall.

He knew Light could feel it too. He caught Light glancing out of the window during the day, eyes focusing on the distant glint of the spire in Tokyo Bay as if hopelessly drawn to it despite how far away it was, before turning away with a shudder and roll of his shoulders.

The government released a statement that the tower was under investigation with its possible links to the 'All Japan Youth Crystallisation Event' to be one of its highest priorities. It was implied that once they understood the crystal composition and how the crystallisation had occurred they would be able to reverse the process.

Their optimism was precious really.

"But a little too late for your sister's volleyball associate."

Misa glowered over the newspaper that Watari had brought up for her. "Don't be so mean, Ryuuzaki."

"No, he's probably right." Light sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's one thing reducing a complex multicellular biological organism to a block of crystal, but the reverse, to go from the simple, crystalline, comparatively low-energy organised state to a flesh and blood human again, is likely impossible."

"Oh," said Misa simply. She bit her lip, looked down at the hands on her knees. "When you say 'likely' impossible, how impossible is 'likely' impossible?"

"Well, it would be like this, Misa." L leaned forward, pulled Misa's neglected slice of baumkuchen towards him then claimed ownership with a stab of his fork. "Say a man was cremated, burnt to a crisp, or charcoalised, if you will. Decrystallising any of those students would be like packing those man's ashes into a mould and trying to bring him back to fully-functioning life."

"Oh."

"That is the magnitude of impossibility we're dealing with here, and as Light implied it would require a significant decrease in entropy. Likely huge, so it's probably completely and utterly impossible by all the known mechanics of the universe."

Misa snapped. "There's no need to rub it in!"

"Ah, like salt in a wound?"

Light groaned and buried his face in his hands, but L could see the reluctant tug of a grudging smile at the corners of his mouth.

And L allowed himself an inward smile and thought that, for now, this was just fine.

The Kira case would continue.

This strange life of theirs would continue.

The mystery of the Youth Crystallisation Event would be solved. The crystal tower in Tokyo Bay would be dismantled. The world would keep on turning, moving on from the candle-light vigils at the school gates; the packing of crystallised boys and girls into the back of vans to clear the roads and for use in study; the grieving parents campaigning for the remaining statues to be covered when the rains came and, when the council attempted to strip the statues of their clothes for being 'fire hazards', allowed to keep their dignity.

But so long as that tower stood and L could feel that strange pull that pushed and probed at his skin as if with millions of tiny fingers he couldn't shake off the thought that there was still something more to come.

It was like hearing a knowing smile in the voice of a distant and unseen singer.

* * *

Once the task force had gone home, Light turned to him, his face lit up blue by the monitors, and L wondered if it was intentional that Light was looking so young (of course, it was) as he asked, quietly, "Do you feel it?"

L tapped the end of his fork against his front teeth. How much was it worth seeing Light's indignation if L denied that he felt anything at all and feigned ignorance?

But under the cold, brittle glow of the monitors he was suddenly reminded of those faces they had seen on the news, white-blue and crystallised, fixed in their final moments in gargoyle masks of terror.

He lowered the fork from his mouth. "Like something trying to get under your skin."

Light nodded and then said nothing, apparently lapsing into thought as he returned to scanning the day's list of mysterious deaths for any pattern that could correlate to Kira, but he was drumming his fingers, rolling back his shoulders, stretching his hands when he thought L wasn't looking as if worried that he might be stiffening up.

"It's alright to be scared, Light. It's only human."

When the words slipped out of his mouth, L was just as taken aback as Light, if not more so and he regretted the sentiment in an instant. What did it matter that for a brief, mad moment L had been struck by the thought that Light was closer to the age of L's successors than to L himself? He couldn't afford to forget who was sitting beside him. Mistakes like this could cost him and with an adversary like Light would be made cost him dearly.

But if the old saying said to keep friends close and enemies closer, then if they happened to be both they needed to be kept closer still.

So long as they were together, they would share the same fate.

Light's face glowed blue-white in front of the monitor. "I'm not scared. Why would I be?"

"No, of course, you wouldn't be. How silly of me. Think nothing of it. I am quite clearly speaking nothing but absolute rubbish."

"If you say so." Light gave a small laugh that was too composed, too well-timed, too planned to ring true in L's ears. "But if you are scared, Ryuuzaki, it's perfectly understandable."

"No, Light."

The fans of the computers whirred between them and the city beyond the windows crawled with colours in red, gold and green. The lights filtered in between the curtains and glimmered on the floor like beetles.

"I don't think either of us understand what it is to be scared at all."

* * *

'Salt blight'.

It was a simple enough name for a very simple condition.

It began at the extremities, toes and fingers turning hard and stiff with the give of a stick of chalk, then extending up the body, skin, muscle and bone eaten up by glittering white crystal and joints melting together.

The first girl who went to hospital was examined then given an important choice.

Would she rather crystallise standing upright or sitting down?

* * *

" _Light-kun, have you ever heard of what happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah?"_

 _"Only so much that they were cities punished by the Christian God in the Old Testament. Sayu would think that those were names of more giant monsters from the movies. Why, Ryuuzaki? What's brought this on?"_

 _"I was thinking of Lot's wife."_

 _" Lot?"_

 _"A man who escaped the destruction of his hometown with his family. God told him not to look back, which seems an easy enough instruction, but surprisingly difficult for humans in all mythologies to follow. Orpheus, to pick another tragic example. Lot and his daughters did well enough but his wife turned and looked."_

 _"What happened to her?"_

 _" She was punished for it, and transformed into a pillar of salt."_

 _"I think I now see why this is relevant."_

 _"I thought you might."_

 _" So she was punished - for daring to disobey God, and perhaps because when she looked back and saw her hometown being destroyed she felt anger?"_

 _"And for a moment she may have lost her faith in God. It would be understandable if she did, but I sometimes feel that there is more to the tale than that. Perhaps God wasn't punishing Lot's wife at all but Lot himself, and it wasn't a punishment as such, but a reminder that despite being the sole survivors of the disaster they had neither been chosen nor favoured by God, and shouldn't expect such luck in the future." L remembered a church with a rose window and pews empty but for pigeons. "It was God checking Lot before he could become too arrogant, or deluded in thinking himself untouchable now that he had escaped once what should have been fate."_

 _Light looked up and L wondered if he had gone too far._

 _"...are you saying that Youth Crystallisation Event happened in order to humble us of all things?"_

 _"To humble the present ruling generation and to make space for a new generation uncorrupted by the same arrogance and sense of entitlement as yours? Perhaps, if you were so inclined as to make a story with a moral out of all of this."_

 _"Humble us...Why would anybody do that to us? And who?"_

 _" I don't know, Light. Most likely nobody. In fact, in all likelihood, this is all simply a random, irrational, unintelligent event with neither rhyme nor reason behind meteorite fell because it did. The Youth Crystallisation Event happened because it did. It's all astronomical phenomena and tricks with physics and chemistry, and nothing more. There is no guiding reason for why this is happening to you and nothing will stop it happening again."_

 _"Then what's the point of all this, Ryuuzaki? Why tell me about Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's wife?"_

 _"For the same reason anybody tells stories, Light. Reality is nonsensical. Nothing happens for a reason except one construed in hindsight. Stories, on the other hand, make perfect sense. Anything that occurs in a story is justified. Ultimately it's comforting for things to have meaning, and this is what stories do. The_ _y make reality make sense when all sense seems impossible."_

* * *

 **Thank you for reading and perhaps I'll see you for part two!**


	2. Salt Blight

**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Obata Takeshi and Ohba Tsugumu. Salt blight, salt fall and crystallisation are the properties of Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro.**

 **Author's Note: And I am back with part two of this strange little one shot which is now a three parter! And thank you to everybody who favourited, followed and reviewed last time. It really does mean a lot to me when I get even the slightest bit of support for my fairly odd projects, so I can't thank you enough for giving this a go. I'm having a lot of internet problems lately because the winter weather chewed up our landline cables. Yep, no telephone either! For that reason, there may be a lot of upload errors. Fingers crossed** **there won't be.**

 **I wish you all a Happy New Year and a 2016 you can be proud of living. Best, Zen :D**

* * *

The first case reported was that of a fourteen year Kawasaki Inori. She went to a school not far, in fact, from Yagami Sayu's. She was the Kanto middle school karate champion, and she arrived in A & E escorted by her coach, her shoulders wrapped shapelessly in a towel.

Once ushered to a room that was safely out of sight from prying eyes, the only doctor willing to see her put a mint into his mouth, to settle his nerves, then turned to face her.

"May I see?"

Kawasaki Inori unknotted the towel from her shoulders.

The doctor's jaw dropped. His mouth hung open. He almost choked on his mint.

Then the coach stepped forward with a bundle wrapped in Inori's spare gi and unrolled it on the doctor's desk.

"It snapped off during practice." Inori cradled the stump of her right shoulder and between her fingers the doctor saw crystal – glittering white crystal where there should have been flesh and bone. "How can it do that, doctor? It's my arm. How could my arm just snap off?"

* * *

The media loved it: The torrid details, the suffering of the family, the plight of a rising champion stripped of her wings, the tragedy of her 'belated crystallisation', and they reported each and every lurid scrap of Kawasaki Inori's crystallisation they could coax and buy out of the hospital up until the moment there was no more to be had.

They wished her well. They prayed for her, whatever good that did (none, but it made people feel so good about themselves, how virtuous they were, especially when they all wore the badges so that everybody could know about it). They called it a race against time.

The more sweetly tragic Inori's decay the more sudden and sensational her recovery would be. Suddenly everybody seemed to believe in miracles and all it needed was a genius doctor to appear as all heroes did – when he was needed – and all would be well again.

L could have laughed, but he didn't.

* * *

Every time the task force left the HQ for the evening and returned in the morning they came back simmering with something, something agitating that made L think of eyes switching back and forth under the eyelids of somebody trapped in a nightmare.

In a week, one case with a face and a tragedy became a table of numbers, as spurred by Kawasaki Inori's high profile case, young people reported into the hospitals, crowding doctors' practices with their bewildered families - who soon became desperate and terrified families when Kawasaki Inori crystallised without even a whisper of an available working cure.

"'Crystallised'." Light snorted. "Not 'died', and never 'dead'."

"Well, it is a time of crisis, Light-kun. Stories with no hope tend not to sell well."

Light glowered at his screen and as they returned to work L felt that strange, simmering nightmare agitation seeping into the corners of the room again.

He cleared his throat. "Also, Light-kun."

Light sighed. "Yes?"

"Twenty eight percent."

"What?! Why?"

"For dwelling on morbid pedantry," L said with no small amount of glee.

And as Light seethed in his seat, L congratulated himself because the creeping nightmare simmer had been banished (and he tried to ignore those distant crystalline fingers, running over and through his skin, that said it was only for the time being).

* * *

Matsuda was reading out a breaking news bulletin. For once, L stopped to listen.

They had found one common link amongst the blight victims. They had all seen a meteorite fall, whether from trains, buses, classrooms, cars or gym cupboards, it didn't matter, and even though none of them had been standing outside they had all seen the flash of light, bright and white like a snap of lightning whipping at the windows.

As an interesting aside, specialist schools for the blind had yet to report a single blighted student amongst their registers, but L had heard what he needed to hear and he was looking at Light, who was, to his surprise, looking out of the window.

Towards that blue-white glint of crystal in the distance.

As if he couldn't look away.

As if he simply couldn't help it.

L snatched the chain between them and flicked it hard.

"Ouch, Ryuuzaki! What was that for?" Light snapped, rubbing the welt on his chin where the chain had caught him.

"Your own good. Matsuda-san, could you close the curtains, please?"

"The curtains? It's still daylight, but if that's what you want -"

Before Matsuda had even risen from his seat, in three brisk strides, Souichirou beat Matsuda to it. He swept the curtains shut as if they couldn't shut them fast enough, throwing them together and rearranging the drapes so that not a chink of light, not a single glint of crystal in the distance, came through them.

Light sighed. "Come on, Ryuuzaki. You can't expect us to sit and work in the dark all day – "

"Light-kun must have been very distracted indeed. I'm not convinced he was listening at all to what Matsuda-san just told us."

"I was listening," said Light, a little too quickly, before he suddenly became aware of all of the eyes fixed on him about the room, filled with various stages of dull horror, and L's heart began to tap-tap against his ribs because it wasn't like Light to miss something that could be so important to him, it wasn't like him at all.

"You weren't listening."

"It was another bulletin."

"Then unless you were busy admiring your reflection in the window, would Light-kun like to tell us what exactly he was looking at that had him so distracted?" Was L angry? He wasn't sure, but there was something that snapped in his voice that resonated with the simmering nightmare jitter that these days seemed to collect in the corners of the room like dark water. "Can you tell us? Do you even know?"

"Ryuuzaki - "

L gripped his knees. "I thought not. Watari?"

The old man's voice crackled from a speaker. Matsuda jumped. "Yes?"

"I want contact with Emergency Committee for Salt Fall and Crystallisation Phenomena and a list of who they've hired as consultants. Find out who can be trusted to be discrete or can be moved through sufficient leverage to ensure they do so." L switched off the intercom and turned to Light, who was looking more unsettled with every passing moment he was at the centre of attention of a situation he had no control over (and how he must have hated it – the surrender of control). "I have decided that it is to the benefit of this investigation if we had specialists on call."

"Specialists?" A flash of understanding and beneath it L saw a low pulse of fear roll like thunder. Light breathed, composed himself then answered his own question as calm and controlled and matter-of-fact as reading from a cue-card. "For the blight."

"For keeping abreast of news concerning the blight, considering how much it seems to be distracting this investigation." L didn't look at him to make his point but Matsuda cringed at his desk anyway. "And there's no harm in keeping an eye on Light-kun as well."

"You think I'm going to get the blight."

Light sounded indignant, accusing, as if L had done something reprehensible in bringing what had been a distant and alien possibility into possible reality within the taskforce HQ walls, and a part of L wasn't sure that it could disagree with the sentiment.

"I didn't say that."

Light let out a short, sharp bark of incredulous laughter. "Look, Ryuuzaki, I'm not like the rest of them. I'm not going to just crystallise up and…" He trailed off and shook his head as if to clear water from his ears. "I can't get the blight when I have so many things I still need to do. For this case."

"I'm glad to hear it. As Light-kun is still our chief suspect and greatest case asset, I am sure it is clear to see that it is in the best interests of this investigation that we have access to experts until we can be assured of your - " Survival. " - safety."

* * *

"The first sign is salt-shedding." Doctor Hirata laid out photographs on the table for L, Light and Souichirou to look at. "You will find salt blooms on the skin of your palm. It will wash away initially but there will come a point where it simply won't be possible without GBE."

Souichirou frowned. "Excuse me, GB – ?"

"'Grievous Bodily Erosion'," L read off the abstract of one of the papers handed out to them and felt his stomach twist. "The name seems self-explanatory."

Light raised his head from a photograph of a boy with half of his face blue-white with salt. "If it's caught at the early stages is there a chance of stopping the process?"

"There are measures that can be taken to slow it once it has set. Constant movement, of course, makes it more difficult for crystals to develop in the joints." Doctor Nanari hadn't stopped glancing between L and Light and the handcuff throughout the meeting. "At the very earliest stages, we have seen that increasing fluid intake helps against internal crystallisation until, that is, the stomach lining crystallises - "

"Yes, but I asked about stopping it, not slowing it," cut in Light through gritted teeth.

"Young man, if we already knew how to do that, this situation wouldn't be what it is. There is no stopping the blight. Your best hope is to pray that you don't get it in the first place."

"And he doesn't have it now?" spoke up Souichirou from his seat on Light's other side, permitted to the meeting as Light's parent and guardian and now looking thoroughly sick.

"For the moment, he is fine. His blood plasma ion concentrations were perfectly normal for a young man his age. All he needs to do is avoid transmission until his nineteenth birthday. These are going to be some difficult months ahead of you, Asahi-kun." Hirata gave Light a sympathetic smile then glanced at L. "It's good to see you have a friend so interested in your welfare."

L pretended he didn't hear Light laugh at his expense and raised his voice. "What do we know so far about blight transmission?"

Hirata and Nanari both fell silent and looked at each other's shoes as though they expected the other's loafers to speak first.

"The tower in Tokyo Bay," L prompted them, his impatience running thin. "What does it do?"

"Nothing, as far as we've studied. It's just a whopping great pillar of salt. There are trace remnants of a ferrite coating, presumably what protected it when it breached the atmosphere, but we've tested it for magnetism, sonic emissions above and below the human hearing range, all known communicative frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, you name some invisible force we could test, we've checked for it. We even hadpriests come and look it." Nanari scoffed and picked up the tea Watari had set by his hand. "It isn't doing anything, for all intents and purposes. None of the others around the country are doing anything either, except - "

"Except?"

"Being visible for miles and miles around. Glittering. Being seen."

"Seen? Are you saying that all it takes for somebody to get the blight is to see and keep seeing that tower?"

"I said nothing of the sort," said Nanari, peering intently into his teacup.

"Then I'm curious as to why nobody has tried to destroy them."

"Would you rather all that space salt got into our water supply? Dissolved into our farmlands? Spread out as a dust cloud over our cities? These things need control, and planning, and caution. We need time to be sure that their destruction won't cause us more harm than good – plus there's a chance we will need higher power explosives to bring those towers down than what we are currently allowed to keep on Japanese soil, unless at an American military base."

"Would the Americans help us?" asked Souichirou.

"We've made some requests, but in all likelihood 'no'."

"Is anybody going to come and help us deal with this?"

"In all likelihood, 'no'."

"Why not?"

Hirata clasped his hands together as if wringing them in an apology. "Because nobody knows about what is happening here in Japan beyond the top levels of each country's government."

Souichirou frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You must remember the worldwide panic that came with SARS! Think of the scale of the hysteria that would spread when they hear that humans - human children - are turning to salt and that we have yet to find out how it is occurring! We know nothing! Nothing can compare to what the terror of knowing nothing can do!" L shoved down the little voice that piped up to agree back into its long dark corridor. "At this moment, there is a worldwide blockade on all news and reports going out of Japan. All flights have been cancelled. Our ports are shut. Our borders are effectively closed. Nobody is coming to help us," Nanari's grip tightened on his teacup, "and those who could are watching to see what happens and what we do."

"We're the experiment?" Light looked up in dismay from the array of photographs on the table and as he continued, his voice began to rise. "Japan is the test population and they want to see the experiment through until it reaches a manageable end?They want to see what happens to us, so that they can be ready when it happens to them!? That's - "

"Perfectly reasonable at a particular level of thought," L broke in before Light could get the satisfaction of saying exactly what L wanted to say but couldn't, "if the greater good is to be considered sacrifices need to be made. Japan, with its already present diminishing population problem would quite arguably be irreparably crippled by this event to the extent that there is little point in attempting to rescue it. Japan has no future. It is a dying country, terminally ill. Now the only good that can come from this is to watch and record the disease prognosis for the benefit of the rest of the human race. It is cruel, but ultimately practical. Ah, apologies, perhaps as a foreigner you don't think in my place to make such comments. I hope I haven't caused any offence."

Nanari had bristled like a sea urchin whilst L spoke but he looked away, muttering, "None taken. As a foreigner, you could hardly be expected to understand what it means to 'read the air' as it were."

"That is very accommodating of you. If it is any consolation, this country makes excellent confectionary."

And all of the sudden the nightmare haze L had been trying to banish was back, thick and hazy as it settled in the corners of the room and seemed to reach out for them with fingers brittle and white as crystalline frost -

Hirata blew out his cheeks and let out a mirthless chuckle. "Well, foreigner you may be but you are here with us, Ryuuzaki-san, at the centre of it all whether you like it or not - at the centre of silence. Now, as you've probably gathered, given our lack of knowledge we can only offer advice for dealing with blight on a case by case basis. The first thing I'd like to say is that you have done a very good thing in contacting us before anything occurred here."

"From what you've told us about Asahi-kun's -" Nanari paused for a moment and looked between L and Light as if he desperately wanted to ask more questions but was terrified of the answers then returned to his notes, " – situation, Asahi-kun may be close to the cut-off point but given that he saw the initial impact flash, and that he seems to be living under unusually isolationist conditions and, therefore, within a high stress environment, he is indeed at risk."

L put his thumb to his teeth. "How much of a risk?"

Hirata hummed and hawed, pulled a face. "Moderate to high?"

"High," said Nanari pitilessly. L glanced across at Light. Light met his gaze and held it. I'm not scared. "Do what you have been doing. Keep the curtains closed so that you don't see the tower. Avoid going outside. Have everyone likely to come in contact with Asahi-kun shower on entry into the building and keep a change of clothes specifically for working here, and perhaps try to spend more time moving. It slows down crystal growth in the joints."

Matsuda saw Doctor Hirata and Nanari out of the building, and L set Watari to the task of stitching the curtains in the taskforce room shut with a thick black thread.

* * *

The speakers crackled. "Ryuuzaki-kun."

"Watari. What is it?"

"There was a telephone call. For Light-kun." Light looked up from his work station and Souichirou an uneasy moment later. Watari sounded unusually subdued. Something at the back of L's mind began to sing like a livewire. "It was from his mother."

Light stiffened.

"I see."

"You said that you wished not to be disturbed today because you were making up for lost time spent with the blight consultants, so I attempted to divert her, but she left a message nonetheless, and said she wanted it conveyed as urgently as possible."

"Put it on the speakers. Light-kun has, after all, nothing to hide," added L when Light looked ready to argue. "Might as well hear it now. I'll only be listening to it myself later if you tried to hide it."

Light silently fumed until there was a soft beep.

"Light-kun?" Yagami Sachiko, her voice soft and tremulous. "I'm sorry if my trying to contact you causes you trouble in any way - not that I think that it would, you've always been so capable - but I felt that you ought to know." She took a deep breath and L had a chilling premonition that he ought to switch the speakers off right there and then if he wanted to keep everything going as they were. "It's Sayu. She started salt-shedding this morning – "

Light rose from his seat. Souichirou let out a low, quiet moan and buried his face in his hands.

"It- it would really lovely if you could come home. She misses you, Light. We all do. It's a quieter house without you, even if you ever were the quiet one." Sachiko laughed but stopped when her voice cracked into a sob. "Just one visit, Light, that would be enough. It'd be so encouraging. She'd like to see you, before she - before her time comes round." Silence swallowed down like a cold, numbing pill. "Light, please, come home - from wherever you are. Your sister needs you here, and – Oh, god, I need you here too. I can't do this on my own, and your father's working so hard at the moment I can't expect him to – There just isn't anyone else I can turn to! Please, Light." Sachiko was working up a smile, they could all hear it, sweet and open and desperate and terrified. "Come home soon. I'm sure that, whatever it is that's keeping you away, we can sort that out together, all of us, as a family."

The message ended with a click.

L tapped the intercom. "Thank you, Watari."

Souichirou was shaking at his desk, his glasses off, his face hidden. Aizawa was all too clearly trying not to stare and failing. Matsuda was, for once, too stunned for words, and seemed to be mouthing simply 'Sayu, poor Sayu' over and over again towards his reflection in his monitor.

Light had come to stand at L's shoulder during the message. He straightened. "I want to go home."

"That is quite out of the question," said L without hesitation.

His chair was snatched by its headrest and spun round, and when it came to a stop L was looking up into Light's blazing eyes.

"You have no idea what it's like to care for family, do you?"

L had braced himself. He had predicted that Light would try to hurt him. It was a predictable response to the situation, and no doubt Light had known L would predict him to respond in such a way - and had not only acted according to expectations, but taken advantage of L predicting those expectations to get away with lashing out at him.

But it still hurt, not least because it was both true and far from the truth.

He fixed Light with a look that told him he could see through all that anger, the smokescreen Light was throwing up over everything he was less willing for L to see.

"As Light-kun has never expressed a desire to visit home before this occasion, I could perhaps say the same for him." Light flinched and there it was behind the anger: Fear, pain, fear of the pain and the pain of being afraid, in a galloping loop at the back of Light's eyes. L raised his voice. "From what I have deduced, it seems to me that, you and I, we are both driven to 'care' by the same things, and those are immediate problems and their solutions. Light-kun is currently one of my immediate problems," he said, as Light seized the collar of his shirt, apparently insulted by L's completely correct measure of him. "So long as the salt blight is a threat to you it is a threat to the case. I do not wish to see Light-kun endangered before he has had a chance to prove himself in this investigation."

And he meant every word and his own sincerity took him by surprise as much as it did Light, who loosened his grip on L's collar, gave him a long, considering look then scoffed. "You mean, to prove that you're right and I'm Kira?"

"Well, I am right. It's a shame I have to spend so much time convincing other people about this just to soothe their pitiable egos, but such is the way of the world. Anyway," he raised his voice again as Light huffed and didn't so much as let L go as throw L back into his seat, "I digress. As so much is yet unknown about blight transmission and we have yet to rule out that it can be transmitted between individuals, Light-kun cannot and will not go home to see his sister."

"Ryuuzaki – "

"And neither, for that matter, can your father, if he wishes to continue working here."

Light's face twisted. "You can't – "

"If Yagami-san goes home he will likely come back contaminated with salt." L glanced over Light's shoulder to where the rest of the task force had gathered about Souichirou and were listening to L's assessment of the situation with mixed expressions. "It is a necessary precaution that I'm sure he will understand."

"I understand." Souichirou hung his head, his shoulders slumping and aging him ten years in ten minutes. "I can accept that. I will remain here, until we can be sure of my son's safety."

"Dad, no, you shouldn't accept this! You heard Mum. If I can't be there, she needs you at home and what about Sayu - !?"

"I am staying here for you!" Souichirou's voice rang through the room and Light fell silent. "Your sister has your mother, Light, but if I go, who will be here for you? Who would you have if something happened?"

L was focused intently on his spoon when Light glanced along the chain then looked back at his father. "Nothing is going to happen to me, Dad."

"Light, I was there in that meeting when those consultants said you were at 'high risk'. It's the sort of thing parents remember," said Souichirou brusquely, replacing the glasses on his nose and clearing his throat. "It is a shame for Sachiko but she is a capable woman and I will not demean her by trusting her any less than she deserves. As for Sayu – you and I both know that she has the best of mothers taking care of her. They will both be fine."

"No, Chief." Aizawa rose from his desk, the set of his mouth grim and determined. "I'm with Light on this one. Can't any of you see what Ryuuzaki's doing?"

Matsuda blinked. "You mean, eating a banana?"

As L played with his food and secretly congratulated himself on his excellent timing, Aizawa looked a little nonplussed. "No. I meant that he's trying to control all of you, all of us, for this stupid game of his! He wants to keep all of us here in the dark and keep going with this goddamn stupid Kira case that hasn't thrown up anything new for the past month - because Kira's probably having his miserable life as mucked up by Salt Fall as the rest of us - as if nothing is going on outside and everything is still just as it was! But, you know what?" Aizawa picked up his coat from the back of his chair. "It isn't, is it? It's a whole new world with a whole new ridiculous world of possibilities out there that all three of the greatest detectives in the world can't face up to yet. Well, you know what? I've had it. I'm going home. To my wife and to my little girl. Because I don't want to be somewhere unreachable when my daughter gets the blight. I'm sorry, Yagami-san, I mean no offence to you, but I can't do what you're doing. I want to be there, at home, taking care of my girl, making sure she doesn't get it at all, and taking care of my wife, because, by gods, do you know what it's like, Ryuuzaki? To go home each night and hold your baby girl's hands and check them for goddamn salt!" He laughed as he stopped by the door and shook his head. "I shouldn't need to justify this. This is why I've had it with you, L. Chief, Mogi, Matsuda, Light – I'm sorry. Good luck to all of you. I'm out. I'm going home."

The elevator doors opened and he stepped inside. He looked up and met L's gaze. "You won't need to worry about me returning and traipsing salt over the floor. Don't call me back onto the taskforce until you've learnt what it's like to have a heart."

The doors closed and the elevator descended out of sight.

L turned back to his monitor, considered what little he had got done that morning, crushed down that feeling of hurt (because he couldn't hurt when his greatest adversary was chained to his wrist and there was no reason to hurt, so long as he was right and knew differently to what he was accused of) and started slowly typing at his keyboard again.

Click. Click. Click.

"Ryuuzaki."

Click. Click.

Light sighed. His chair creaked as he sat down. "Alright. I'm staying here."

L gave the letter F a jab that was no more vicious than the others but the click! seemed louder. "Yes, you are."

Light said nothing more, and one letter click at a time, the taskforce resumed work.

After some time with only the sound of their computer fans and the muffled rush of the city outside, he heard the wheels of Light's chair move closer. "Aizawa didn't mean what he said at the end, you know."

"Oh, he meant it, and perhaps he's not entirely wrong. It's not so far removed from what you said, after all, and you certainly meant what you said, about family," noted L, somewhat distantly.

Light winced. "I shouldn't have said that."

L hummed and twirled his finger in the air before stabbing down on the K, missed and landed on L instead. "People are curiously honest when they think they have nothing to lose."

* * *

His first priority was to the case, and in order to solve it, one way or another it required Light to remain alive.

Aizawa was wrong when he suggested that L didn't know what it was like to go home to his daughter and turn over her hands and check them for glittering fragments of white that might have gathered beneath her fingernails.

The first thing L did when he woke up in the mornings was glance at the pillow of Light's camper bed (with new dark-coloured sheets, precisely for the purpose) for traces of salt that might have been shed during the night.

If he lost Light, Kira would defeat him by forever slipping out from his grasp, and he would lose this case, and L couldn't lose.

He had Watari go over the curtains, already stitched together, with staples, on all windows facing Tokyo Bay, all out of the professional concern and feelings of responsibility that he had for the case upon which he had staked everything to solve.

That's what he told himself.

That Light was a friend he didn't want to see suffer such a cruel and unusual death as salt blight was something he kept quiet even between himself and his own thoughts.

* * *

Misa came down into the taskforce room in her most flamboyant black lace and silver taffeta dress and long boots as if going to war.

"Boost morale?" Light exclaimed after Misa straightened from what she called a 'morning sunshine' kiss that she placed first on his nose then cheek, a new ritual she had come up with in an attempt to 'brighten up Light's day' now that all the windows had been covered and it was difficult to tell day from night. It certainly brightened L's day watching Light putting up with it. "Well, I suppose it would. It sounds like a good idea but – "

"So, since Light says it's a good idea, it'll be alright, won't it, Ryuuzaki?" Misa whirled round, her eyes huge and blue. "Won't it, Ryuuzaki?"

L closed his mouth, gave a non-committal hum, and laughed to himself when Misa stamped her feet and did a little jig on the spot which looked as if L needed to remind her where the nearest loos were.

And then she started crying.

Oh, now, that simply wasn't fair.

"I was watching the news last night." L had to hand to her. She really was very good at those tears. Light could probably learn something from her if only he would step down from his pedestal, and L probably could too except Ryuuzaki never shed a tear. "And I saw those clips of all those girls going into hospital, and it got me thinking, and I remembered something really important to me."

How you came to be the second Kira, perhaps? Light gave L a warning look over Misa's shoulder that told him in no small words that now wasn't the time, so he settled for a neutral, "And what was that?"

She squared her shoulders. "My fans."

Ah. He was going to have to retract what he had thought about Misa's tears. There was little chance either he or Light could ever learn to put on anything like that because Misa, for all her showy displays of froth and lace and projected images of sweetness, knew how to be genuinely, openly, purely honest in a way that was an unfathomable mystery (and an impossibility) for either of them.

L lowered his cube of youkan. "Of course. Misa Misa's core fan demographic was teenaged girls, specifically between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. I see."

"'Are teenaged girls'. Don't you dare talk about them as if they're all crystallised and dead already, Ryuuzaki-kun," Misa shot back, her voice rising dangerously high as she bore down upon him. "Most of my sweetest fans are all right in the middle of the high risk age range and I know some of them are in hospitals! They've written to me from hospitals! I've contacted people I know in the industry – Watari gave me a phone, you can check all my tapes later, and they're all perfectly innocent and good – and they all agree it'd be a good idea. We're going to go around hospitals, cheer on families and victims, make them feel a bit better. It isn't much, but making people happy just by being Misa Misa is what I'm good at and if it's all that I can do for them….Well! They were all I had to make me happy before Kira, and Light, of course. " Misa wiped her eyes and mascara smudged all along the back of her hands. "Oh, this isn't fair. They lied about this mascara. They said it was hundred and twelve percent and waterproof and would last through typhoons, and look at it, it's getting everywhere. I'll start looking like Ryuuzaki if I'm not careful."

L wasn't sure what she was implying with that last statement, so he ignored it. "You will be away for some period of time?"

"Yes. We'll be travelling around the country, going between the towns and hospitals with all the worst blight. We've got plans for Sapporo and Osaka sorted already," Misa replied, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief Matsuda had lent her. "I know what you said to Yagami-san about coming back here, but this building's so big and I don't help out here in this room at all, so when I come back, I'll be totally fine if you lock me up in a part of the building that nobody ever uses until you're happy that I haven't brought back any bad salt. I'd do anything so long as Light is safe, but I have to do something for my fans, Ryuuzaki. You can see that, can't you?"

"I can but I'm afraid I can't allow it - "

The door to the room opened. "Ryuuzaki-kun."

"…Watari."

Watari smiled benevolently from the doorway. "A moment, please, of your time." The handcuffs jangled as L stood and dragged Light up with him. "Amane-san, this shouldn't take long."

* * *

Misa left an hour later with Mogi and a Boston bag she had packed the night before, which L upturned ('Pervert!') and had Watari search and scan until they were satisfied she was secreting nothing out of the building. Mogi would be her 'Hope Tour' manager and bodyguard. He would also be a tail reporting on her activities for L until they returned.

They were both given strict instructions on minimising exposure to salt by Doctor Hirata and Doctor Nanari and Mogi was warned that on returning he would have to work with the rest of the taskforce remotely from another part of the building until L was satisfied that he wasn't carrying any contaminants.

Misa threw her arms around Light's neck and hung there as if he were her scaffold. "You'll be alright, won't you? Whilst I'm away?"

"I'll be fine, Misa. Locked up here, I'm probably the safest eighteen year old in the country," he said with a smile but underneath it L heard a current of frustration and possibly even envy, because here was Misa, stepping out into the outside world that Light couldn't even see from the windows anymore.

Misa laughed, a real laugh, unlike whatever Light conjured up these days (if not every day). "I know you'll be fine. Light-kun's young but he's not the kind to lose himself to a silly bit of crystal!"

She waved as she stepped into the elevator, blew them all kisses as it closed.

* * *

L chased crumbs around his plate.

The schools had closed. The Self-Defence Force had been mobilised to clean up the salt (Hadn't taken long to forget that they had once been children, had it?) from the streets and transport remains from homes and hospitals for safe disposal. Ministers were resigning, citing 'personal tragedies', and those who remained were trapped in back and forth debates about honourable choices, important duties, family or country, sacrifices, priorities, that with all their showboating and grandstanding may as well have been pantomimes to distract the masses.

L couldn't care less. With the windows covered and nobody but Watari occasionally leaving the tower, it was becoming difficult not to feel detached from the world and even more difficult to care for it.

Light had scathingly called this their 'ivory tower'. L hadn't bothered to correct him because Light was right. Here, in their own small, secret, unchanging and reliably double-edged world, where the rules of reality hadn't changed, L had control over anything and everything he could put his mind to. He could ignore the chaos of Japan collapsing around him and bury himself in the Kira case in their own private eye of the storm.

"It's falling apart out there."

Light was opening up the Asahi then Sankei news pages and scanning through the headlines. It was five past six in the morning. Watari had yet to come in and switch on the lights and the room was dark and sea-green with the glow of the monitors.

They had spent the night in their chairs. L had woken from resting his chin on his knees to find Light asleep at his keyboard. Light had thrown himself into the work with a new energy that had taken everybody but L by surprise. Matsuda and Souichirou seemed to think that he was trying to take his mind off what was happening at home with Sayu and his mother. Perhaps he was, but from what L saw he was more likely trying prove to them all that he was as far from death as he possibly could be.

It was a shame that Kira hadn't made any overt moves of late. The new Kira would have been caught in an instant, and then L would have had his answers about Kira and answers about Light. The case would have all been over, and L could have left Light to whatever fate was deemed fit for him.

At least, in theory. He couldn't imagine leaving for a while. The quarantine locking down Japan made flying out in style somewhat difficult.

Watari had laughed when he had told him that, as if there were any other reasons why L couldn't imagine leaving.

"So it would seem," he said at length, "but it bears no relevancy to us - unless this is indeed Kira's doing after all, with a new modus operandi."

"This isn't Kira, Ryuuzaki. Inducing heart attacks in criminals is one thing but turning all under eighteens, criminal or otherwise, into salt is another. It could be a new Kira entirely but if it is then they're acting on their own, completely out of concert with the others. Their agenda is too different - "

"Yes, very well, well done, bravo and now I should like to get a new slice of that excellent Swiss roll from last night." L hopped off his chair and shook the chain between them. "Light-kun will accompany me to the kitchen to make sure he does as Doctor Nanari recommended and moves after a long period of inactivity."

"Yes, yes, I'm coming. It's not as if I have any choice in the matter," Light grumbled, pushing himself up from his workstation and dusting off his hands -

L was beside him in an instant. He snatched hold of Light's wrists. "Why are you doing that?"

"Doing what?"

No.

"Stop it!" L snapped when Light made to brush his hands together again, as is trying to clean them off and the movement was so natural that Light had yet to notice. "Don't do that."

"Don't do what!?"

A dull, dry crunch sounded through the taskforce room.

Light froze. Then, slowly, he uncurled the hand he had bunched into a fist.

Something sparkled between his fingers as they caught the green-blue light of the monitors.

"Oh, god…" Light breathed, his eyes dark and glassy. A shiver ran through him from head to toe. "No. Goddammit all, no! Ryuuzaki – "

"Don't…" L swallowed his tongue. Words weren't going to save anybody. Words had no power. Prayers proved that every day every hour these days in Japan. "Just…Watari!"

A speaker crackled. "Yes?"

"Turn on the lights for the taskforce room."

The room lit up bright and cold with the pale fluorescent lights. L was standing in the middle of the floor, holding Light's wrists in a white-knuckled grip, heart hooked up to his throat and beating, beating, red and black, blood and bile, burning with anger at himself and cold sticky dread at what would come next.

And fear. So much fear.

"Light." Light had closed his eyes. He couldn't even bring himself to look. L took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "It's alright to be scared. It's only - "

"Only human, I know. You've said that before, you fraud, and you don't even sound like yourself when you say it! Who am I talking to when you say that? Deneuve? Coil? And frankly I don't want to hear it from somebody who's possibly the least human human being I've ever met!"

Words poured out of Light in an angry rush and L almost laughed - nervous, terrified, mouth wide open like a scream, laughter. He settled for a strained smile. "I would say I was hurt but if our positions were reversed I would say exactly the same for you."

Light did laugh. "I'm not scared."

"Maybe so," L gently eased his grip, "but if that's the most convincing Light-kun can be then perhaps I should be."

He turned over Light's hands.

Their palms glittered white with a fine, delicate, crystalline bloom of salt.

* * *

 **Thank you for reading and I'll wrap things up next time!**


	3. Crystal Salt

**Disclaimer: Characters are the property of the Death Note franchise, salt concept the property of Arikawa Hiro, Shio no Machi.**

 **Author's Note: Last chapter! Here we are, and thank you very much to all those who followed and favourited this story. It is an odd one but I am very pleased to bring this mini- project to completion. Apologies to readers of Ghost. This took longer than anticipated so it will be some time before I get round to finishing Ghost's chapter.**

 **In any case, fingers crossed, toes crossed, I've written something relatively suitable and moving enough to satisfy the moment? Well, one can only try. Best, Zen :D**

* * *

"Light-kun has started salt-shedding."

Doctor Hirata widened his eyes. It burned L that he could look so surprised, as if Hirata had truly believed that Light might have had a chance to escape, and if that was so, then somehow, somewhere, at some point somebody must have failed, and the thought of that was unacceptable.

"He has had no direct contact with any blight victim."

Who was to blame then? A deep wrong had occurred. Somebody should be culpable. Somebody should be held accountable. What was L's life if not to prove that there was always a culprit no matter how incredible the wrongdoing?

"He has had no contact with salt."

Bad salt, he remembered Misa calling it, like something dirty.

L had never liked salt much anyway.

"If, as you say, this is a spontaneous incident, he would certainly provide an invaluable data point." Hirata was choosing his words carefully on the videochat. Why? Why be careful now? "I will be with you in two hours."

"Remind me how much the Japanese government are paying you and then how much I am."

"I will be with you in one hour." L almost smiled. This was how people should be. People should be predictable. People shouldn't be spontaneously sloughing crystal from their skin until their skin started to slough from crystal. Hirata coughed into his fist. "Where is Asahi-kun?"

Temporarily handcuffed to his own father with Watari keeping a close eye (and ear through a bug on Light's coat) on them in the taskforce room, working on the Kira case. Blight wasn't anything that would get better with bed rest. Work, however, was a comforting distraction.

He caught himself looking to his right and expecting some guarded, double-barbed response and quickly looked away. He shook out his wrist.

"He is with his father."

"Is he at a hospital?"

"You know that hospitals are having no more success than for those who remain in their homes."

"You certainly have a point there. If he has access to family and care where you are then you may as well keep him where he is." Doctor Hirata heaved a long, heavy sigh and pushed up his glasses. "I'm sorry, Ryuuzaki-san."

"Yes, so am I."

The words spilled from him before he even realised he had spoken and he was stunned by his own bitterness and the anger in his voice.

Hirata nodded as if he understood, as if he could possibly understand what was at stake if L lost Light here, when the case had yet to close. "You shouldn't blame yourself."

 _Insipid man._ "I don't."

Because the only human party to blame in any of this was Light, with his spontaneously salt shedding body, with his eyes that saw the Salt Fall flash, with his obsessively tended facade of 'look at me, the pinnacle of accepted societal norms' buffed and polished to dazzle credibility away from 'absurd' and 'abnormal' L and his theories that had driven that insistence to open the curtains.

"Ryuuzaki-san."

"Yes?"

"As you said, Asahi-kun's unique conditions of isolation from any other members of his age make him a very interesting case. It would be of great benefit to us if we could obtain a photographic record of it."

"Photographs." Like the ones Hirata and Nanari had brought to their very first meeting and spread out in a gallery of horrors. "I see."

"And also interviews throughout the course of events. It will not be for nothing. You would have our constant attendance upon his condition, and were he to encounter any difficulties Nanari and I would be able to present his case to others who may be of more use to you."

L considered. After some time staring at his toes, he spoke. "Since carrying out a usefully informative interview relies on the full, comfortable cooperation of the interviewee with a complete understanding of the interviews' objectives, concerning the interviews you should ask Asahi-kun himself."

"Of course, yes."

"As for the photographs…" How strange. He had no reason to be troubled by this. Light's every move and mood swing had been documented and observed for the past few months on L's own orders and insistence. He understood why the doctor wished it. Doctors weren't so different from detectives in their modus operandi, and yet he found himself resisting the idea with an odd reluctance. "If you must."

* * *

Light agreed to the interviews. He agreed to the photographic record too. Something about the stubborn glint in his eyes, the battle-ready determination, reminded L of the look of Light's face in the earlier days of his incarceration.

It was a good look, L thought, as he removed the handcuff from Souichirou and replaced it on his own wrist. It was better than the sickeningly brittle fear he had seen in the morning when he had turned over Light's hands to find salt ingrained in the folds of his friend's (adversary's) palms.

"The more information they have, the more likely they'll be able to figure out how to stop this and the higher my chances."

Light looked pointedly away from L, as though to daring him to ask precisely what chances Light was referring to, typed with a harsh patter of keys that sounded like rainfall then suddenly grimaced and reached out to wipe his hands on a damp cloth Watari had left at his desk for when salt had built up too much between his fingers.

"You are quite right, of course," L replied, watching a few flecks of salt fall from the towel and drop on top of Light's printed research. They joined a thin layer of blue-white crystals already dusting its surface like powder snow.

L didn't realise he was staring until Light, following L's gaze, snatched up the documents and shook them off into a bin, slapping them against the bin's sides before straightening with a glower.

 _Don't stare_ , was the obvious reprimand. L could see it on the tip of Light's tongue, but the last thing Light would ever want was to signal that L was making him feel vulnerable, and as he thought, Light simply returned to his work, tugging the chain between them as though to remind L of what he should be doing too.

 _Don't look._

Too late.

 _Don't watch._

That was what L was here for - to see this case through the end, but he looked away as he climbed onto his chair and gripped his knees.

Because for all that he was there to watch, watching his most exciting opponent encountered yet slowly turn into a pillar of salt was not what L was there for.

As if reading L's mind, Light chose that moment to open his mouth: "I'm not going to crystallise."

He spoke as if he was making L a promise.

L picked up a sugar cube from the bowl on its tray and dropped it into his tea. It landed with a plop like a jumping goldfish. The white crystals dissolved away on the surface then melted away.

After a moment of thought, he took another two cubes, then another two more and after gleefully watching little white crystals disappear.

"Thirty two percent."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Ryuuzaki! Really?"

"Kira seems just the kind to be overly optimistic about the reach of one individual's willpower over reality, wouldn't you agree?"

"Yes, yes, whatever you say," but L thought he saw a tug of a smile, "I'm not going to get any pity from you, am I?"

"We both know that the devil gets too much sympathy as it is." L lifted his teacup, examined his distorted reflection in its porcelain belly, sipped the tea then set it back onto its saucer. "Light-kun."

"What now?"

"If you wish to do so, you may visit your sister." There was a fragile pause to Light's typing. L reached for another biscuit. "After all, the worst that could happen to Light-kun has already done so."

* * *

Crystallisation was an unpredictable process.

There were some for whom it ended within three days of initial salt-shedding, others for whom it began slow, the blight consuming their bodies at a pace that could be called leisurely, rather like licking an ice cream, until all of a sudden a child only crystallised up to her wrists would find blooms on her face and then they would be a solid block of inanimate crystal within the space of an hour or less.

Some coloured in the chart given to them by doctors to record their crystallisation with the same sized portion of their body each day, regular and 'paced out'.

Some crystallised in a snap and froze in the midst of moving, talking, eating.

Some, for a short length of impossible time, were still conscious, even after they had crystallised.

They were living crystal statues. They moved, they spoke, some cried, if only for the final five or ten minutes before they seized and stopped at last, or, if as in one notorious case did, family members broke them apart with a sledgehammer and shovel to 'put them out of their misery'.

To scientists' frustration, there was no unifying pattern. Young people seemed to be crystallising in as many different steps and at as many different rates as there were, well, young people.

The longest crystallisation recorded so far was fifteen days.

Sayu was on her ninth.

* * *

Sachiko hadn't called the taskforce HQ again since leaving her message for Light. Light hadn't responded to it - it had been easiest to pretend he hadn't heard the message at all, and kinder, so he said (yes, so he said), on Sachiko than to offer up excuses, but she kept Souichirou updated and the last they heard of Sayu her left arm and leg were both solid blocks of crystal that she lugged around with the help of a strapped on crutch for balance. There was a smudge of salt on her chin that Sayu had playfully dubbed her 'stubble'.

When Souichirou called the phone that Light had been allowed for the day and passed on the news, Watari was already turning into the road outside Light's house. Sunlight had been pouring in through the windows across Light's face, but as they were driving within distant view of the Tokyo Bay crystal tower, he was wearing a bright blue eye-mask with angry yellow eyes, borrowed from Matsuda as a blindfold. He hadn't seen daylight or the world beyond the HQ walls since Watari had stitched up the curtains.

* * *

Sachiko took a deep shuddering breath, her hand tightening on the door handle, and L felt Light brace himself beside him.

For a blow? For a slap? Sachiko didn't seem the type but there were circles around about her eyes, hollows in her cheeks, glints of silver at the roots of her hair, and a long white chalky of salt scraped down the front of her dress, and she wasn't quite the picture perfect mother of a picture perfect son that L remembered, and he, more than anybody, knew that her son was only perfect in picture.

Her eyes wavered over Light's face before glancing down to his hands.

And it struck L that somehow she knew. She knew why Light had come back now, of all times, and that it wasn't really for Sayu, but mothers practised at being perfect for years knew what perfect mothers forgave their children for whatever transgression, however selfish.

Sachiko fell forward and when Light caught her as she let out a long, wispy sigh. "I don't need to know where you've been if you can't tell me."

Light glanced at L out of the corner of his eye then gingerly stretched his arms around his mother. Even L, standing back behind Light and shuffling in his plimsolls, heard the soft crunch of salt as Light's gloved hands found her back.

"I got a message from Dad," said Light. "Sayu…"

Sachiko nodded, her shoulders curled in. She looked threadbare. L thought of Lot's wife with the hot winds of destruction blowing at her back and wondered how somebody could look so small and strong and weak at the same time.

"She's in the kitchen."

* * *

Sayu was sitting at the kitchen table.

Sayu had been sitting there since breakfast.

One crutch was propped against the side of her chair, the other still strapped to her arm. Her right hand was stretching out to grasp something – a cup or a glass, going by the curve of her palm, Sachiko must have cleared it away.

The final step of her crystallisation had been sudden and fast. It had frozen Sayu in place with her mouth parted in a small cry of surprise, and now here she was – white and shining, every strand of hair, every eyelash, turned to crystal so delicate it looked spun, wearing faded green pyjamas patterned with gingko leaves, that L remembered vividly from his surveillance on the household. He had an eye for patterns, he couldn't help it.

"I thought I'd wait before calling the collection team," said Sachiko, as Light came to a stricken stop beside his little sister and reached out to put a hand on her cold, dry, crystalline shoulder. "You never know – some people are saying that they're still conscious, even when they're like this, that they're still in there. Somehow. And I couldn't bear even thinking about packing her away – "

"No, Mum, that's fine. If she isn't in anybody's way, there's no rush to call a team." Bending down to a crouch, he looked into Sayu's face, staring at every perfectly preserved feature. "And who's to say that she isn't still in there somewhere?"

Sachiko gave him a small, grateful smile. Then she reached out and clasped the salt statue's open hand.

"Sayu-chan?" She smiled, still hopeful, and the crystal statue gazed mutely back. Sachiko glanced at Light then back to the little crystal hand. "He's a little late, but look who's come to see you."

* * *

Light was silent all of the way back to the taskforce building. He didn't even protest the eye-mask L made sure he wore before he left the house, or the handcuffs L replaced when they were back in the car.

* * *

They returned just as Souichirou was leaving to see Sayu and Sachiko himself. Light saw him off with a tired smile and nod, then they climbed in the lift to the main floor, where Matsuda was temporarily holding the fort and looked both relieved and scared when L and Light came through the door.

"How was – er – " Matsuda bit his tongue when both looked at him. "Never mind."

Light moved first, dragging L across the room to the nearest bin.

"She was salt. Every inch of her." He peeled off the glove from his right hand, watched white dust trickle from his fingers before turning over the glove and shaking out a long stream of white crystal shards into the bin. "Everything. Even her eyes – her hair – "

"You've seen it before on the news," L pointed out, taking the glove from Light as he peeled off the other.

"Yes, but that was my sister! My own – " Light shuddered and concentrated on removing the other glove.

Then after another long stream of fine white dust poured out the left hand glove as well, Light gripped the edges of the bin and promptly threw up everything he had eaten since the morning into it.

And as L stood by and let Light get on with it (because what else was he supposed to do?) and Matsuda went rushing off to fetch a glass of water and a change of bin, L tried to imagine what he would have done, how he would have felt, if he walked through the gates of Whammy's House and found every single one of those children locked in place as blue-white crystal statues, Roger sweeping specks of crumbled salt from between the floorboards of the dormitories.

Yagami Sayu's face, caught by surprise, hand still reaching for a drink, turned and looked up towards him from the back of his mind. Her eyes were dusty and crumbling in their sockets.

* * *

"Shouldn't we tell Misa?" said Matsuda one day, after checking through the day's reports Mogi had sent of Misa on her 'Hope Tour' with an expression that got increasingly wistful and sad with every cheery photograph attached. "About Light? She'd want us to tell her, wouldn't she?"

" _No._ "

"No?" L put his thumb to his teeth, noted the stiffening of Light's hands, how much slower he typed, less like rainfall and more like a broken tap. "Light-kun is cold. Surely, of all people, after his family it should be his girlfriend who is informed of his condition – "

 _"I don't want her to see me like this."_

"Well, I'm seeing you like this, Light. Is there a difference?"

Light looked L square in his eyes. "I have a choice with Misa. I don't have a choice with you."

"Yes, I am, after all, the only realistic obstacle between Kira and his ultimate goals. As Kira you really don't have much choice but to make use of this opportunity to observe me at close quarters, as I am doing with you - "

Light swept up the keyboard from his desk. For a long moment, he held it above his head like a weapon, a bludgeon he could crack over L's precious head, the source of all his frustrations – no doubt he blamed L as much as L blamed Light. It was simply how they both worked best – lying to themselves on the back of 'true enoughs' when truths were too dangerous. He had that red gleam in his eyes that said that perhaps in another world, if he wasn't so set on proving his innocence, he would do it, but in this world Light simply turned the keyboard over.

Salt slid out in a fine white sheet from between its keys and landed with a hiss on the floor.

"I'm not Kira, Ryuuzaki," L couldn't help but glance at the glittering line of salt on the floor and then the white blooms curling along Light's wrists like vines, "but I don't have any choice but be observed by you until I've proved you wrong – but given the option of some privacy, in this situation, I would take it. That's all I'm saying. It's tough on Misa, but like she said, I'm going to be fine, and besides," he tested a couple of keys on his keyboard, "I wouldn't want to distract her from what she's doing."

A key jammed with a sticky crunch. It was followed by a loud crack as Light finally dropped his fist on it with a cry of frustration. "Damn it!"

L sighed and spoke into the intercom. "Hello, Watari, could we get a new keyboard, please?"

* * *

"Misa's tour seems to be doing well." L listened to the patch of silence seething beside him as Light got to grips with typing at a speed that was painfully slower than his thoughts on a smooth, grooveless medical keyboard, scattering grains of salt over the desk between them. "She sends her love, you know."

"That's kind of her." Silence stretched and bubbled, thickened in the shadows of the task force HQ. It was five in the evening. It may have been daylight, it may have been a blazing red sunset, the days were getting shorter but in the taskforce work room lights switched on at six thirty and went off at twelve, and the curtains stayed closed.

"As you wished, we haven't told her anything." L took a capsule of gum syrup from the tower he had built and poured its contents into his tea, stirred, tapped the spoon against the brim. "She's still in Naha. They're receiving her efforts quite well in Okinawa."

He had started seeing Yagami Sayu's crystallised eyes in the sugar cubes and had since dispensed with and reluctantly replaced them with gum syrup. It wasn't ideal, but then again, in the ideal world Light wouldn't have twists of crystal setting in hardening sheets beneath his skin.

He heard Light gulping down water from a bottle Matsuda went to refill every half an hour.

"Ryuuzaki, do you want to focus on the case and catch Kira or not?"

 _But I've already caught him,_ thought L with a petulant purse of his lips, _he just doesn't know it yet._

And it wasn't a victory unless the opponent was aware of his defeat.

 _You were Kira before._

 _Why can't you be Kira now?_

* * *

It happened one morning when Light fell out of his bed.

L woke up to a sickening crack that made him think wildly for a moment of a celery stick being snapped in two before a shocked scream had him leaping from his chair.

Light snapped from where he was curled up on the floor. "Don't jump around like that, you idiot! You'll dislocate my arm!"

"Light-kun screamed."

"And they call you a genius? No, I was singing. What do you think, Ryuuzaki?" He flailed in the sheets his legs had been tangled in and it would almost have been funny if the sounds of that terrible scream weren't still ringing in L's ears.

"Is Light-kun hurt?"

"I – no," said Light, with a frown and then a look of detached wonder that L didn't like at all.

He squatted down next to him on the floor. "I didn't think Light-kun was the kind to scream for no reason."

Light pulled himself up to his knees. His face was a bloodless mask. He lifted the sheets and gingerly untwisted them from where they had caught around his ankles.

The sheets came away.

Along with his left foot.

Snapped clean off at the ankle joint which ended in a flat, powdery stump, its cross-section filled entirely with blue-white crystal.

And all L could think, as a thousand and one thoughts clamoured and screamed and demanded that he _look away_ then _run away_ was, _Well, that explains the celery_.

"It doesn't hurt." Light appeared to be fascinated, or perhaps he was doing the same as L was, and running away from nightmare. He stretched out to the stump of his left leg and brushed his hand over the exposed crystal. "It really doesn't hurt."

L swallowed. "No, I'd imagine it wouldn't if the nerves had crystallised."

Light picked up his foot by its ankle, held it up. For a long stunned moment they contemplated it between them until Light lowered it and set it against the stump at the end of his leg.

"We could use a glue-gun," suggested L.

Light stared at him. "I'm not arts and crafts, Ryuuzaki."

"No. No. You're not." L felt strangely numb. Nothing seemed to be sinking in as keenly as it should have been. He had vague sense that his hands had gone clammy, that either one or both of them were shaking, that there were large pieces of salt digging into the soles of his feet on the floor. "Would Light-kun object to duct tape?"

After an incredulous beat of silence, Light started laughing, quietly and shakily. He curled up over his foot and cradled it against his chest.

* * *

They used duct tape. And a glue-gun.

Then Watari did the sensible thing and found a crutch.

* * *

"It is highly irregular for Light-kun to fall out of his bed."

"I was dreaming."

"Of something shocking enough to forget he was in a bed?"

Light paused over his dinner. No more chopsticks for clumsy fingers, no more knives or forks for unpredictably brittle joints. Just a spoon for the curry Sachiko had insisted Souichirou take to work 'in case he saw Light', having somewhere along the line come to the (correct) conclusion that Souichirou saw their son more often than he admitted.

Light lowered his spoon. "I dreamt that I was crystallising."

"Ah." _Why can't you dream something murderous and incriminating that I could string you up by? Why not be Kira, Light? Surely, it would make this easier for the both of us._ "In detail?"

"Yes. Sudden onset rapid crystallisation. Like Hirata said happened to Sayu. It was quick."

"I see."

"I could feel it. Everywhere. Salt. On my skin, in my skin, under my skin," Light went on, spooning up a diced potato. "It felt as if spiders were crawling all over my bones whilst somebody held down my hands and feet and poured sand down my throat."

"That sounds unpleasant."

"It was." L lowered his eyes to pour another five capsules of gum syrup into his tea, but he felt Light's gaze on him from across the table. "You were there."

 _Oh, dear._ "Was I now?"

"Yes. And my dad was there, and my mum was there and Sayu was there, and you were all standing in a line. Watching me crystallise up," Light's speech was stilted and jerky, his tone too tightly controlled. L focused on the crutch resting at Light's left elbow and the flavour of the tea slipping over his tongue. "And nobody said anything or did anything until I started to feel the crystal getting into my eyes, and that's when Mum, Dad and Sayu stepped up – and they told me I deserved it. That I deserve this. "

He kicked the table leg with his right foot and something cracked. _A toe_ , L told himself, _probably just a toe. Just a toe_.

"And what did I do?"

"You picked up a sledgehammer and asked my dad for a bucket of water to wash away the pieces." He returned to picking at his curry. "That's when I woke up. Satisfied, Ryuuzaki?"

L hid his face behind his teacup. "Sufficiently. Light-kun does realise that he has, at least by some theories in the highly questionable field of psychoanalytics, admitted to subconscious knowledge of having done something potentially deserving of retribution, something that his father would disapprove of enough to aid me in…" L recalled that case with the shovel, "…putting you out of your misery, and to which I am the prime figure of threat, given as I wield the sledgehammer."

"Confirmation bias," said Light shortly, "you can interpret a dream to fit whatever theory you see fit. Have you thought that maybe it's you, every day and every night, telling me I'm Kira, looking at me like I'm Kira, thinking that I'm Kira, hoping that any day now I'll turn into Kira, so that you can be right, that's making me think like this? You're willing me to be Kira, because then maybe you can say that all of this happening to me is happening for a reason! And then your case will be finished, and you'll be able run away from all these things you can't explain and go hide in some dark room behind your monogram and voice filter back again at wherever it was that you came from!"

L let the echoes of Light's words fade away into the shadows of the kitchen, waited until Light had turned away with a frustrated huff and started picking at his curry again before rolling back his shoulders to ease the tension in his neck and speaking.

"Light-kun blames me."

Light let out a bitter, high-pitched laugh.

L swilled the sugar syrup collected at the bottom of his teacup. "It's not like you to be so free or, dare I say it, honest with your thoughts."

The spoon faltered on its way from plate to mouth. Light muttered, "People are curiously honest if they think they have nothing to lose."

"Light-kun has a lot to lose, unless he no longer intends to live and prove me wrong."

Light said nothing and his face smoothed and closed like a book being snapped shut on its reader's fingers.

"Light." Light continued eating and ignored him. He seemed set to make this an evening of pretending that L didn't exist and the idea was abhorrent to L because then he would have to confront all of the horrible shadows seething in the quiet spaces of his mind instead. "You don't deserve this."

Light knew better than to falter this time, but something jagged and too complicated for anybody other than L to ever decipher rushed across his face in a painful flash.

When his expression had settled again, Light scoffed and, under his breath, said, "Liar."

L couldn't fault him on that. Of course, L was a liar.

He still had too many things to lose before he stopped lying to himself.

* * *

Bathing and showering was out of the question. Light had to make do with a damp cloth and a bucket, and even then, somebody else had to wring the towels before he used them. It frustrated Light to no end.

It gave L a window for a peace offering.

Of sorts.

He wasn't sure what it was he was needed a peace offering for, but it couldn't hurt.

When the can L rolled along their table bumped against his wrist, Light started and glanced up.

"Dry shampoo," explained L, pointing at his own hair, as Light stared blankly back at it him. "It is shampoo, Light-kun, that is dry."

"I know what it is, and we both know that you probably need to use it more than I do," retorted Light, flicking it back along the table.

"But I do use it. That Light-kun failed to notice this puts to question his usually excellent observation skills."

L slid it back and this time Light rolled his eyes, took it and put it to the side of his monitor.

"Thanks."

L nodded and brushed stray grains of salt off the desk-space no man's land between them.

* * *

"Your father has told your mother about the truth of your absence from home."

"What? When?"

"This morning, and before you ask, no, I had nothing to do with this. It is unfortunately, a breach of your father's contract, so whether I can allow him to continue on the taskforce is another matter - "

"You will," said Light firmly, glaring down the length of the chain as if it were the barrel of a rifle. "You need the manpower, and you don't have the time or the patience for learning to deal with somebody new on the taskforce at this stage of the case, or teaching them how to cope with you and keep up with your methods. Not to mention there are too many ways in which his relationship to me and interest in my wellbeing can be used to your advantage."

L put his thumb to his teeth and smiled around it. "Light-kun paints quite an unforgivable picture of me."

"You're the one who ordered him to fire a blank inches away from his own son's face."

"It was a test that produced results and I would ask him to do it again if only its efficacy didn't hinge upon the element of surprise." Light made a sound like an angry cat being kicked but L paid him no attention. He sipped his tea and leafed through the stack of potentially Kira-related articles with the toes of his right foot. "In any case, what I wanted to say to you before you jumped down my throat was that your mother has been asking to come here and see you."

"Why should that matter? You wouldn't even think about letting her - " Light's typing slowed, stopped and L studiously focused on pincering a list of 'natural' deaths from a prison in Wakayama prefecture between his first and second toes. "You think I'm going to crystallise. You think I'm going to die. Soon."

Some leaps of logic were truly unhelpful (especially when they were correct).

 _Yes, yes, I do, and so does everybody else, but what can we do?_

L raised his eyebrows. "I didn't say that."

"Yes, you do. This is how people get treated on their deathbed! You're making special allowances for me you would never have made if it weren't for this!" Light held up his hand, scrunched it into a fist and puffs of white dust blew out from between his fingers. "She's already seen what happened to Sayu. She doesn't need to see this."

"Light-kun is implying that he would only be willing to see his mother when he is at death's door?"

"Don't twist my words. You know perfectly well what I mean." Light cleaned up the area around his keyboard, jaw clenched and when he spoke again his voice was low and laced with a frantic, feverish sort of energy that made L's skin crawl. "I won't die. I can't die. I won't die. There's still too much I need to do."

L couldn't resist. "Such as, ridding the world of criminals until Kira is the only one left?"

"I meant catch Kira!" Light's face reddened from a sickly shade of grey that L hadn't noticed before, or rather he had and he hadn't wanted to..

He turned away and hunched in his seat.

If he didn't look at Light everything was almost as it should be. He didn't see frost swirls of salt blooms. He didn't see the bright white medical keyboard. He didn't see the way Light jumped up every time L so much as leaned sideways on his chair to pick up a graph so that the handcuff didn't saw through his wrist.

Except it wasn't in L's nature to close his eyes to anything. He saw. That's what people needed him for, to see things they didn't see and didn't want to see, things too raw and painful and dirty for their consciences, because he had never been scared of seeing truths before and had made a game of it.

"And there's no need for this."

"For what?"

Light gestured between them and L noted with some fascination the salt climbing over the handcuff. "This distance," sad Light, his lips thinning. "You're treating me as if I'd shatter if you so much as spat on me."

"Oh, not shatter, but you might dissolve."

He heard heels kick back, a chair slide and the chain rattle as, crutch forgotten, Light bore down on him with a raised fist –

The blow didn't land.

L looked up over the tips of his toes. Light was standing over him, stopped in mid-swing, and for a frantic moment dread swept through him as he thought he would look up to see Light's face frozen like Yagami Sayu's in horror and surprise.

But it wasn't, and the rush of relief was almost overwhelming until L briskly shrugged it off. "Is something wrong?"

Light was pressing into the skin of his right forearm, digging with the fingers of his left hand, and as he dug the blood drained from his face.

Sickly blue-white, he retreated with hurried steps to his seat. "Nothing."

"It's spread again," said L, answering his own question.

Light gripped his forearms. His expression was ugly. "I suppose it's no use saying that it's none of your business."

And no use pointing that L would probably have been proved right if Light had followed through with that punch: His arms _would_ have shattered.

"No use at all, since anything to do with Light-kun's mental and physical health _is_ very much my business." L swallowed down the nausea curling up his throat with a mouthful of tea that was fifty percent sugar syrup. "If it's any consolation, Hirata and Nanari say you're doing remarkably well for eight days of blight."

Light let out a small 'ah!' of understanding. "So that's why you're making special allowances for me. Eight days of blight, and Sayu died on her ninth. That's why you think I should see my mother. Ryuuzaki, I've said that I can't die and I won't. Don't you trust me?"

 _I need somebody to believe in the impossible because I can't believe in it myself_.

How could he make such demands of L? L didn't believe in the impossible. It was Kira who believed in the impossible, in a crime-free world, in good people satisfied with being good, and really Light wasn't asking for trust at all.

"So long as Light-kun remains alive and the Kira case unsolved, I cannot, do not and will not trust him."

Light smiled. He had apparently expected nothing less and L wasn't sure if the thought at being so predictable sat well with him.

"However," L held Light's gaze as he went on. "I _can_ have faith in him - his tenacity, his willpower and his ability to constantly astonish me, and in this I do have faith in him, and I will continue to do so."

A flicker of surprise. _Ah! Now, that was more like it._

Light swivelled in his seat and returned to staring at his monitor.

He cleared his throat. "Then if you can have such faith in me, there's no need for my mother to come and see me. I'll ask Dad when he comes in to tell her that she doesn't need to worry."

"You can tell her yourself."

L and Light turned as one, as Souichirou arrived for the morning, looking ashamed and troubled, and trailing behind him, eyes darting around the taskforce office, wearing pink and cream and gentle pastel shades that were so out of place in the blues, blacks and greens of the headquarters that it almost hurt to look, was Sachiko.

A smile stretched across her hollow cheeks. "Light!"

Light let out a resigned sigh, quiet enough that only L would hear it. "Mum."

* * *

Watari brought them tea. And monaka. L liked monaka.

"Those…er…handcuffs, Light?"

"Leave them, Mum. They're to help prove I'm not Kira." L hummed into his tea and picked up another monaka wafer. Light folded his arms and steadfastly ignored him. "If this is what it takes to do so, I'll wear these to the very end, when I've proved myself."

"Proved yourself...hmm…" Sachiko pursed her lips. "Well, you are your father's son, and I want you to be true to yourself, as you always have been, so, so long as you believe you're doing the right thing."

L choked on his monaka. Light glowered at him.

Sachiko didn't seem to notice. She sipped her tea and eyed the room again, sweeping the corners with her gaze. She paused on the dark curtains, stapled together at the windows, and something dimmed in her expression. "So this is where you've been these past few months."

"Mostly."

Her eyes flickered to L. She recognised him, of course. If not from the university matriculation ceremony she certainly recognised him from the day Sayu crystallised. "With this young man?"

"He's the greatest detective in the world and I'm learning a lot from him," said Light with all the earnestness of the perfect student, and Souichirou looked up from his workstation with a small nod of pride.

L could have laughed (especially because he knew Light was also laughing at him, deep down inside).

"And are you trustworthy?"

It was with some surprise that he realised Sachiko was addressing him, her teacup nestled in the palm of her hand.

 _Trustworthy?_ Why anybody set so much store by trust was beyond him. Nobody could be trusted absolutely because it was beyond human nature to be absolutely consistent. Absolute consistency only begged others to take advantage of it and eventually be burdened to the point of exhaustion.

Trust was so demanding, especially when it tugged on his attention like the chain to his wrist.

"Oh," L waved his teacup in an airy, hopefully impressive, gesture, "nations entrust me with their darkest and dirtiest secrets."

"Only when there's no other choice and they pay you in millions to keep quiet."

L pulled a face and looked wounded. "Light-kun is harsh."

"'Light-kun' is telling it like it is, you - "

A soft sound, like falling feathers, and at the unusual noise they both looked up. Sachiko was chuckling into her tea. She still looked tired and worn but the smile lit up her face like candlelight.

"You've made a friend, Light."

Light burst into laughter a little louder than L thought was necessary. "I guess I have."

"Oh, I know what you're like. You wouldn't have tolerated him this long if he wasn't a friend, especially with those." She indicated the handcuffs and the chain between them.

"He's observing me to help prove I'm not Kira – and don't even think about it," said Light, suddenly turning to L with a withering look.

L blinked in entirely affronted innocence. "Excuse me?"

"I know what you've been wanting to say since earlier but now just isn't the time for it."

L opened his mouth to reply, quite smartly he thought, that he would quite gladly stop thinking about Light being Kira if Light turned himself in and stopped _being Kira_ , and to the side of them, Sachiko laughed into her teacup and whispered to Souichirou when he approached, "I'm glad. Sayu was so lonely at home."

* * *

The ninth day came and, no matter what Light said, L could see it weighing on his mind, but it came and it went without incident, and after that the days and nights were ticked off one at a time. Ten days, twelve days, fourteen days – it seemed as if, unlike Sayu's, Light's crystallisation was going to be a long, slow, stubbornly drawn out fight.

Doctor Hirata started interviewing him with a hopeful, upbeat tone in his voice that L could only think of as facile and dangerous and he hated the man for it, but what he hated even more were the experimental therapies Doctor Nanari brought in.

It was the hope that he loathed, that made him sick to the pits of his stomach: the hope when they attached Light to an intravenous drip filled with some new concoction meant to impede the march of the crystal up his arms, because three minutes after the needles came away, the tiny cuts on Light's arms would be filled with splinters of blue-white crystal.

* * *

Misa called on the sixteenth day. Matsuda passed her across to Light. No doubt it was a hint that it was about time Misa knew but Light could be as deliberately dense to hints as L when it served his purpose.

"It's so sad," he overheard Misa say, sighing into the phone, "but sometimes I look at them when they're crystal and I can't help but think how beautiful they are, Light. They're all young and pretty and they look like they're made of diamonds. You don't think I'm a horrible person, do you, Light? To call them beautiful when they're like that?"

"No, Misa. Of course, I don't."

* * *

At twenty one days it was confirmed that 'Asahi Light' was the longest surviving case of salt blight so far. L hovered over the latest Kira related rumours he had found on the internet and wondered whether it was worth daring to hope, if only to briefly buy into the illusion of respite.

He went to sleep away from his desk more often these days, partially because when Light got up to go he had to follow before the handcuff snapped through Light's wrist, and partially because he was getting tired of this nightmare, and a growing part of him hoped that if he went to sleep he could wake up, and this time wake up for good, back in the world he understood, the _real_ world, the one where he and Light would have caught their new Kira and Light might have been methodically plotting L's downfall again, if L didn't catch him out on it first.

That was the world he wanted to wake up in, the one where the great detective L was still capable of solving every immediate mysterious problem he was faced with.

 _Wake up._

* * *

L woke up.

The links of the chain were clinking. The handcuff was sliding up and down his wrist.

Light was pacing back and forth within the length of the chain, just like he had when they had tried to contact Sayu after the meteorite fell into Tokyo Bay.

"Light," he spoke into the dark and the pacing shadow paused then carried on. He heard the scrape of duct-tape trailing along the floor. It had probably come loose from his ankle again. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Go back to sleep, Ryuuzaki."

He checked his internal clock. It said that the time was somewhere around ten or five minutes past four. "It isn't like Light-kun to be awake at this hour of the morning."

"And you've watched me sleep enough times that you can say that for sure?" There was an edge to Light's tone, like a puzzle piece disturbed from its place, shaken loose. "No, don't answer that. Of course, you have."

L focused on Light's shifting shape in the dark. "When the man who likes his sleep regular and routine breaks his routine something is wrong either with him or his world, or both."

"Nothing is wrong." Duct-tape brushed against the floor. The chain clinked. "Just go back to sleep."

"If Light-kun is awake, I cannot afford to be asleep - "

 _"God damn it, Ryuuzaki, just, for once, do as I say!_ "

Fat chance of that.

L switched on the light.

And immediately bit down hard on his tongue, as Light lit up like a blue-white ghost at the end of his bed.

Eyes manic and bloodshot. Skin mottled blue-white. Overlapping scales of crystal oozing from his hands, feet, neck. Flakes of salt sliding out of his hair to the floor like ice floes and settling on his shoulders like snow.

He looked tired but too jittery to notice himself.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Ask Watari. It's all on the cameras, as always."

There were faint white marks on his face, long lines running from his eyes down to his chin. Gouges from his crystallised fingers, L decided, because Light didn't shed tears. The Light L knew would never dare such a thing in front of him. Never. Light Who Was Kira and L's Adversary was never meant to look so...

Desperately, deeply afraid.

"I can feel it," Light rasped, pacing again, dragging that left foot with its duct tape bindings behind him as if afraid that if he stood still too long he would freeze for good. "Burrowing into my skin. It's like being eaten alive. It's everywhere. I couldn't sleep. I - "

The usual Light would probably get a perverse kind of pleasure in seeing L so disturbed but tonight something was different and perhaps that was what disturbed L most of all.

L climbed out of bed. Salt crunched between his toes. He shoved the thought of where all that salt had come from to the back of his mind and he reached out for Light's wrist, catching him in mid-step.

"Tell me when you feel it."

He pinched the lowest patch of uncrystallised skin he could find on Light's right arm, a coin-sized circle of skin at his wrist. His nails scraped against crystal hardening over muscle.

"Nothing," said Light, fidgeting in his grip.

L nodded. He moved his fingers next to pinch Light's forearm, close to his elbow, where they had last recorded the crystallisation boundary.

"Nothing," he said again.

L swallowed. He pushed up Light's sleeve. Aside from a rash of salt blooms, the last time they checked the upper arm had been crystal free, but, now - now it crackled when L put his fingertips to it like roadside slush after snowfall.

He recoiled before he could help himself and hurriedly wiped his fingers on the back of his trousers.

"It's spread, hasn't it?"

Light was smiling, as if at L's discomfort. It would have irritated L if it wasn't so strained, if it wasn't just another paper-thin mask that was better than the terror of having nothing in place at all.

Buttons had been stitched up Light's shirt sleeves for ease of examination and L undid the buttons at Light's shoulder just in time to see a luminous swathe of crystal bleed up from Light's arm to shoulder like a wash of watercolour.

He buttoned up the sleeve and let Light resume his stumbling pacing. "It's spreading."

"How quickly?"

 _I can see it spreading._

The words stuck and L could say nothing at all. He was caught between the swirling panic of all the things he could and should say and the terrible urge to just cover his eyes and scream.

"But the spread's been slow," said Light with a frown, reading L's silence with all his infuriating pinpoint accuracy. "Then what is this? I don't understand what's happen – "

He trailed off, his eyes stretched wide.

He looked down at his hands.

Then he made a sound like a sob and a laugh and a scream all at once.

"Oh, god, this is it, isn't? This is it."

L reached for the intercom. "Watari, call Hirata and Nanari. It may be sudden onset RC."

 _"Understood."_

L rang off and turned back to Light. "The doctors are on their way."

"Oh, I'm sure they are. They wouldn't want to miss seeing this. They've been waiting for this to happen to me since day one, the vultures, fine lot of use they've been!" Light snarled, lips curling from his teeth, shuffled pacing becoming agitated stalking. "What's it like, Ryuuzaki? Just watching? Are you enjoying seeing me like this? Do I look more like Kira now that I'm crystallising up like some monster from a fantasy novel? I've always thought you must think me some kind of monster to be capable of such things as Kira. Do I look the part now?"

"Light-kun knows perfectly well that Kira is no such fantasy monster," replied L, hunching his shoulders as Light's words struck home and left their bruising marks, "and that like all very real monsters is simply another monster of the heart of man - and no, I am not enjoying this, but neither can I allow you to hide from me when I am required to observe you."

Light shook his handcuff at him and sneered. "If you feel any such sympathy for me you'd take this off. What use is it now? I can hardly run."

"Because did not Light-kun say that so long as these cuffs were in place, our fates would be the same? If that statement is to be true, then so long as I am alive, Light-kun must try his very best to live as well, and I am going to hold you to your word, or is Light-kun's word something I should start considering suspect?"

He sounded like a child. Demanding that promises be kept. Expecting the world to bend to his simple playground rules and whims. Pleading his friend not to disappoint him at the same time as threatening any deviation from his expectations to be considered a betrayal..

It was childish but L had never pretended to be otherwise, and after giving him a long, wondering look Light closed his eyes. "I did say that, didn't I?"

"Indeed, you did."

A dry, cracked smile that vanished in an instant, as Light balled his hands into fists and tried to pull together the scraps of his composure. "If you're going to keep me walking and talking to distract me do it properly and walk yourself, you lazy bum."

* * *

Which was how L found himself walking alongside Light, up and down the corridor outside of their room, turning when they reached the lift, turning again before the emergency stairs, salt falling from Light's steps. Their trail glittered behind them like the spread of the Milky Way.

Crystal grated between his toes.

"I thought this was another dream," said Light, on their third walk of the corridor. He laughed but stopped when it broke into a shaky breath. "I want to wake up. I don't care if it means I break my other leg or an arm this time – I want to wake up. Fall out bed. You'll laugh at me without actually laughing in that way you always do when you think you've caught me out. Then we'll fix everything with duct tape again and get back to work. Catch Kira."

"Agreed," said L, privately adding that he would settle for simply waking up. _Treacherous thought!_ The Kira case should have come first. _Look what you've done to me, Light, even my thoughts are betraying me now (and my thoughts are all that I am)_.

The lights in the corridor were cold and yellow and they turned the blue-white salt blooms curling up along Light's neck a pale shade of green. It occurred to L that maybe they should contact Light's father, and his mother, call them, wake them up, but then that would be acknowledging that Light was…or at least, in very real danger of…

They didn't know that yet. This could be a flare up, a bad moment. Perhaps it was something entirely new no one had seen yet. Maybe it needed to get worse before it got better.

"This isn't fair." Light sounded tired, likely from being on his feet for what L suspected was a good couple of hours, and delirious. "I can't die here. I can't die yet. I can still do more, and there's still so much more to be done! I'm still trying to clear my name. I'm still trying to make you see that I'm right and you're wrong. But you're going to watch me d – "

Light's voice cracked. L wondered if he was being cruel, staying beside him, listening to that sharp, stubborn, fiercely driven, weapon of a mind as it fractured at last, Light's pride disintegrating, grain by grain like the crystals on the floor.

" - you're going to watch me crystallise," Light went on, and when L looked up from matching their steps, Light was glaring at him, demanding his attention with narrowed eyes. "And then you'll never be proved wrong, because I'm the only one who can do that. I'm the only one who could ever prove you wrong about anything."

'Light-kun has a disproportionate sense of his own significance to me' was what arose to the forefront of L's mind but what instead dropped from his mouth was: "Perhaps 'something', but I should rather hope not 'anything'."

Light looked to the end of the corridor with a troubled frown. "I haven't even finished what I started."

"What did you start?"

"Clearing my name, of course. Showing you I'm right. Because you say you've never been wrong, Ryuuzaki, but _I've_ never been wrong either."

"Only because nobody has ever seen through Light-kun's lies. Perhaps not even yourself – although, not to worry, I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time."

"I'm not Kira!" Light snapped, and for a flicker of an instant, the despairing haze was burned away from his eyes, and L congratulated himself for a job of ticking off Light well done. Yes, that it. That _'s who you're supposed to be. A sanctimonious, self-righteous, prideful prick wearing the face of a better man. Don't make me pity you._ "I'm not Kira, and I refuse to die your chief suspect!"

 _That's more like it._

"Then I look forward to it." L met Light's gaze and held it. "Seeing what you come up with to prove me wrong. Prove that I _can_ be wrong, Yagami Light."

Light's face shone at the prospect of a challenge but then a shudder ran through him and his hand leapt to his throat where tendrils of crystal were climbing under his skin like vines.

"…I need to keep moving."

Another slow length of the corridor began. A detached part of L noted that, this time, he was setting the pace. It was barely noticeable but it unsettled him more than he thought such a small sign of weakness ever could.

The phone in his back pocket hummed. Watari. L took it and put it to his ear.

 _"Ryuuzaki-kun, the doctors are on their way. I am leaving the building to collect them from the station and will return within half an hour."_

Too late. Too slow. Everything was too slow except for that greedy spread of pale green, luminous blue-white tearing up, up, into Light's face. "Do they give any instructions?"

" _They say to keep Light talking and conscious until they arrive."_

L gritted his teeth. "Is there _nothing else_ we can do?"

A startled pause and L realised with some surprise that he had raised his voice. _"If his mouth hasn't crystallised yet, you could try to get him to drink more water. If anything it might help slow the internal crystallisation. Ryuuzaki-kun – "_

L ended the call and grabbed Light by the end of his sleeve, it was safer than the sharp-edged cuff. "Can you still drink?"

Light tentatively licked his lips and grimaced as they tasted of salt. "I'll have to be careful."

* * *

"If you die, Light," Light flinched beside him as L poured water into a glass and it splashed up against the sides, "it would be quite troublesome for the rest of us. Think of the mess you'd leave us with. Trying to tie up a case now with no hope of ever being solved, because the main culprit is dead and the truth with him. Oh. I'm sorry. I suppose it would still be most troublesome for you, being dead."

"Yes, and I'll remember that you were a right bastard to me as I was dying, Ryuuzaki, and come back from the grave to haunt you. Specifically you, my chief tormentor, with all of his false and baseless accusations."

"Hmm, that does sound troublesome. I could imagine Light-kun being quite a persistent lingering spirit. An especially malevolent one at that. Ah!" L straightened from hunting through Matsuda's desk drawer for his box of coloured straws, an orange straw in hand. "This will do."

Light stopped circling the small patch of floor in the taskforce room and approached. He reached for the glass of water then stopped.

Flexing his living crystal fingers with creaks that reminded L of frostbitten branches, Light frowned. "I don't think I can – "

 _Damn your pride._ L picked up the glass and turned the straw towards Light's face. "I'll hold this. I assure you, I have as little interest in seeing Light-kun dissolve as I do in throwing away the Kira case."

 _You can trust me._

 _Trust me for long enough that you might survive until tomorrow._

Light looked wary but he nodded. L held up the glass whilst Light guided the straw past his crystallising lips.

His face had turned white during their lift journey down to this level. Now it had the same dusty complexion as a marble statue and a disconcerting brittleness to every fine detail, like the line of his nose and the curve of his eyelids. His hair too was more white than red.

Light pulled away from the straw and gagged. "This is pathetic."

"This is only for now," L said firmly, because they both needed to believe that.

"It's in my mouth already. Makes everything like drinking seawater." Light spat a mouthful of water to the floor and closed his eyes, repeated as if as a mantra. "I need to drink, I need to drink, I can't die, I can't die – "

L pressed the straw from the refilled glass into Light's fumbling fingers again. "Fifteen reasons that you aren't Kira."

"What?"

"Convince me. Now."

It was a distraction, painfully obvious, both obvious and distracting for the both of them.

Light drank, pulled a face as the water dissolved the salt growing in his mouth. When he opened his mouth to gag he spluttered, "I have no memories of killing any of those criminals suspected to have been the first Kira's victims, or how I could have done such a thing whilst you had me under surveillance in my own house."

"Good." L took back the glass and refilled it from the bottles he had brought from the kitchen. To think, they had had this exchange often enough that the pattern of it had become like the tune of a song they both knew, something they could find comfort in. "I can well believe that you remember nothing of it, but there is every chance that those memories have been repressed, either involuntarily on your part from trauma - which I consider unlikely given close observation of your nature - or deliberately, precisely so that you are able to keep up this charade of innocence by some strange, mysterious means, perhaps by the same means with which you killed those criminals in their cells. Killing memories is not much different from killing men after all. Here."

He held up the glass again, Light drank and made a face as if he was in pain, which was becoming increasingly unlikely as the crystal burned through his body.

He swallowed the water in three long gulps and blinked tears from his eyes, "Do you honestly, after all this time, still believe me to be a mass murderer? Do I look like that kind of person to you?"

Ah, Light was playing along, and here they were back to another old argument to which L had already come up with half a dozen answers in past exchanges of the same kind. Light stepped away to pace again, flexing his wrists, barely held in panic flickering across his face like a rainstorm over a desert.

"Light-kun knows that mass murderers come in all shapes and forms, which tends to be why they constantly take us by surprise when they do appear," replied L, measuring out another glass, and slopping water onto one of Matsuda's reports. Ah well, it was unlikely to have been anything significant. "And I asked for reasons, not rhetoric. Try another one."

Light rolled his eyes and glowered at the ceiling as he walked. "If I was Kira it would be one of my top priorities to kill and eliminate my challengers. I have had plenty of opportunities to kill you and I have not taken them."

"Come now, Light." L tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder and opened the next one. "We both know that it would be an insult to your intelligence for you to even attempt to kill me directly, especially here and now where the taskforce and Watari would see it - and also during an investigation of this third Kira case which, if all goes well, you could use to prove yourself innocent and likely manipulate the circumstances in a favourable manner that leads to my indirect death. Another one."

"What is this? Dutch courage? Maybe you should drink too," Light joked as L searched for a new straw from Matsuda's collection, the last one clogged with salt, Light's smile a jumble of shards of all of those other fake smiles L had become familiar with. "If I were Kira, of all the people I could choose, do you really think I would take on Misa as an accomplice?"

L raised his eyebrows. "Only you know the true circumstances behind that one. Perhaps she had something that Kira didn't that he could use – that ability to kill with only a face, for example. Drink." He held up the glass and Light fidgeted on the spot, and before L's very eyes crystal crawled along Light's cheekbones, moving up to his ears and hardening as it grew. He hummed to clear his head. "Perhaps she put him in a place where he couldn't refuse her aid. She might have a surprising hold over him. We know that she is single-minded and forceful with what she wants when she wants to be. I, for one, am still unsure as to what convinced Light-kun to take on Misa as a girlfriend, but Light-kun's love life, to use the most flexible definition of the term, and the quirks of his heart are his own – Ah! Watari!"

Watari was in the doorway, gesturing for a frazzled-looking Hirata and Nanari to follow him in.

At the sight of Light, Nanari faltered. His mouth dropped open. He stared openly and helplessly, until to L's surprise, his face crumpled, his eyes glistened and he looked away with shaking shoulders.

 _He had hoped, hadn't he? How dare he hope?_ _How dare he have pinned all of those hopes on Light and lead them all to dare as well? Because even L had dared and wasn't he paying for it now?_

His hands shook on the glass of water.

Hirata made a small noise at the back of his throat as if he was about to throw up, then he pulled out a small camera from his pocket and said, "Asahi-kun, could you look this way?"

* * *

They examined him in the taskforce room, kept him standing upright.

By examine, that meant, running what L thought looked like a meat skewer, slender and around thirty centimetres long into the crystallised mass of Light's body until he could feel it, because where he felt it there was still flesh and nerve-endings.

L had seen it used in news clips, in cartoons informing the populace not to be alarmed when it was used on their children.

This was the first time he was to see one used on Light, and he perched on his swivel chair and gripped his knees as Nanari undid the buttons on the side of Light's shirt.

"Look at Ryuuzaki-kun, young man," said Nanari briskly. "Don't look at the needle."

 _I can't die,_ said Light's eyes, furiously pleading. Perhaps with fate. Perhaps with the future. _I can't die._

And L repeated back to him, _You can't die,_ all the while Nanari slid the needle slowly into Light's waist and Light failed to feel it.

* * *

There was another passage in the Bible. It talked about another disaster, amongst the many disasters the book seemed to describe with such relish. It said to remember Lot's wife in its events, but what followed never struck L as making much sense. It said that whoever tried to keep their life would lose it, and whoever lost their life would preserve it.

Two people would be in a bed. One would be 'taken' and the other 'left'.

 _"Where?"_ they asked, whoever 'they' were, and the answer came back, " _Where there is a dead body, there the vultures gather."_

* * *

"You've been a remarkable case, Asahi-kun."

"Thank you, Doctor Hirata."

L drank gum syrup straight from the capsules and squatted on his chair beside Light in a way that would make it very difficult for Doctor Hirata to take another photograph. He had half a mind to have Watari confiscate the camera. Why he had any issue with Doctor Hirata's photographs, he wasn't sure, because he had had hundreds of stills taken of Light from his surveillance, but that moment when Hirata had come through the door and raised his camera –

L tore off the lid of another gum syrup capsule, slurped up its contents then crushed the empty carton between his fingers, and over the sound of crackling plastic, he heard Nanari lean forward in his chair.

"If you would rather be seated for the last stages of crystallisation – " _No, this was wrong. There weren't going to be any last stages, because Light was going to live,_ "now is the time to say so, or make any other requests. You did well drinking as much as you did. It's likely bought you another two perhaps even three hours, but it won't do much more."

Light looked down, at his own two fists, shaking at his sides, then his eyes travelled up to the cuff at his wrist and along it, to L – who was crouched on his chair as if just waiting for the doctors to leave so that they could begin another day of searching for signs of Kira.

 _We still have a killer to catch. You still need to prove me wrong._

Light gave him a small, barely perceptible nod, the set of his jaw hardening as he resolved to rise to a challenge presented by L one more time.

"I'll stay standing," he said to Nanari, smiling. "After all, a lot can happen in three hours. I'd like to stay moving as long as I possibly can."

"A lot can happen, that is true," Nanari agreed, glancing between L and Light with a wary look as if whatever madness possessed them was contagious (and there was a kind of madness hovering around them – madness driven by fear had simply crystallised into madness driven by desperate hope, which was in the end was only a madness driven by the ultimate terror of slipping into despair). "Nevertheless, I would recommend Asahi-kun calling his parents and letting them know of the sudden change in circumstances. It's best to clear the air of any regrets, after all."

"I have three hours, doctor," said Light, for all appearances serenely content with the idea. He reached up to brush hair from his eyes and lowered his hand when it touched delicate crystal. "There's no rush – I've never done anything to disappoint them, so there wouldn't be much to say."

* * *

"Three hours," repeated Light quietly after Watari had moved the doctors to another room for tea and refreshments whilst they waited out the night. He jutted out his chin and smiled. "They said before that every case was different. They can't know that for sure. In all likelihood, their numbers are about as arbitrary as your Kira percentages."

L came in on his cue. "Forty six percent."

"I don't believe that number means anything for a second."

L turned away, gnawed at his thumb. "It's to motivate you."

 _Prove me wrong._

Light eyed him incredulously. "Do you think I need any more motivation than I already have?"

 _I can't die yet._

"Hmm," L picked at the sheets of paper on his table and brushed stray salt from their surface, "I'll concede that, this time, Light-kun may have a point."

"Good," said Light, standing straight and resuming his strides about the taskforce room within the arc of the handcuff chain, every inch of his skin bright white and faintly glowing silvery blue.

He still wasn't entirely crystallised. There was a soft column of tissue running down the core of his body cavity. His heart was still beating. His eyes were still his own, but there was a strange, glacial grace to his movements that hadn't been there earlier. Every movement looked smoothed, as if edges and inconsistences had been polished away, less like movement and more like the cold slide of moonlight over clouds.

"It's been a while since these were opened."

Light was standing by the sealed curtains. He ran his hand over the folds of cloth and left a long white line of dust from his fingers.

From beyond the curtains could be heard the soft rustling of a city turning over and stretching in its sleep.

L put his thumb to lip and looked up to the ceiling.

"It'll be sunrise in a couple of hours."

And Light hadn't seen daylight for a long time.

* * *

There was window on the ninth floor that faced directly eastwards, putting the tower in Tokyo Bay just out of sight. Watari cut a square hole into the curtains with a pair of fabric scissors, unlatched the window and slid it to one side.

"Thank you, Watari."

"…Ryuuzaki-kun."

"Yes?"

Watari glanced over L's shoulder to where Light had already gone to the window and was leaning against the frame, carefully avoiding the drops of condensation on the windowsill. L waited, scratched his shin with his foot, grimaced when he crushed a chunk of salt between his toes.

But after an uncertain pause, Watari sighed, said, "Call me when he wants his parents to be contacted," and walked away, and L thought nothing more of it and went to the window.

Tokyo was a grey-blue spread of shadow with the occasional red and white flicker of car lights on the road and molten splashes of neon in between and a pre-dawn haze hung over it all like a shroud of cigarette smoke.

"It's an ugly city," said Light, as soon as L was standing beside him.

L cast him a sly sidelong glance. "The people in it?"

"The skyline – and, so much for subtlety, Ryuuzaki, I could see that Kira-fishing coming from miles away."

But despite his words Light's gaze was fixed on the city and drinking it all in as if thirsty for it, for its lights, for its people, for the damp concrete of its pavements, for the moon fading behind the clouds, for a wide open sky above and a world to seize and make his own below it.

The wind nipped at L's face. He shivered and hunched his shoulders to his ears.

"Is it cold?"

"Bitterly." He rubbed his toes together then crouched so that he could bury them in the hems of his jeans. "Light-kun is missing out on very little."

They lapsed into silence, for a while simply watching the city as it flickered and blinked with lights. Beside L Light was unnervingly still, every baseline muscle twitch and spasm frozen over, and L soon found himself glancing sideways, just to check that his friend ( _adversary, adversary, remember this, he had to remember this (but did it matter anymore?_ )) was still there.

L blinked and leaned closer, suddenly incredulous. "Are you crying?"

"You think I'd ever cry in front of you?" Light scoffed and raised his hand without thinking to wipe the tears from his face. "It's the wind. That's all. Wait, what are you doing?"

L had rushed to pull an old napkin from his back pocket and was raising it up to Light's face. He started dabbing before Light could protest. "You're dissolving your own fa…," L paused, feeling lost at sea and then thoroughly seasick, "...salt. Your own salt. On your skin."

Light seized his wrist and Light's fingers were all sharp facets and grainy planes, his eyes bright, his bared teeth blue-white in blue-white gums. " _Say it_."

"Maybe Light-kun should close his eyes. If the wind is getting to them - "

"Say it, Ryuuzaki," Light snapped, and L watched in dismay as track after track was carved into Light's face from his eyes to chin. "My face. You were going to say my face. Say it. It's the truth. It's what's happening to me. You need to accept this, because it's the truth and you're supposed to be the greatest detective in the world! How can you be the greatest detective in the world if the truth starts to frighten you? _You_ , of all people?" He snatched the napkin from L's hand and scrunched it into his fist. "So there is more to this world than you can explain from your ivory tower. So, what? _So, what, Ryuuzaki?_ If you can't accept it, then what about me? You'll just make me another part of that big lie you hide behind to pretend the world hasn't changed. You've got enough lies to hide behind as it is. This lie, that nothing's changed, if you hide behind it you'll never come out from behind it ever again, because you won't be able to and it will _destroy you._ " Light seized L by his shoulder and shook him, as much as he could, and his voice trembled as went on. "I need you to accept this is happening. You just can't keep hoping that you're going to wake up, because you aren't, Ryuuzaki. This is your reality, your truth, as much as mine, and if you keep running away and denying this it'll burn you to nothing, and when you're nothing - "

A sharp intake of breath, and Light suddenly looked away into the dark of the empty room, muttering, "Ignore that last part. I was forgetting myself."

But L had heard the words as if spelled out in taps of a mallet against a bell tolling silence.

 _Who will remember me for having seen who I really was?_

The wind circled his ears and his nose stung. Everything hurt and everything was cold and nothing was how it ever should have been in L's world anymore.

He closed his eyes.

"You are not to die," he said, and when he opened them again, the moon chose that moment to drift out from behind the clouds. "Do you understand me? You cannot die when I have yet to prove that I am right."

Light's face twisted, a fold of shadow. "And when you are right, you'll throw me to the noose?"

L stepped forward, close enough that Light could probably see his own ghostly reflection in L's eyes and Light flinched. "You will fight this and you will live, Yagami Light. Aren't you always the exception? Exceptional Yagami Light!" L didn't blink, he couldn't afford to, he was struck by a strange and irrational conviction that it was only his gaze holding this moment together and if he blinked it would disintegrate. "But even exceptional, if you crystallise here, you'll be nothing but pieces and shards and mineral dust on the carpet. You'll shatter like a mirror. Watari will clean you up with a dustpan and brush. He'll tip you down the sink. He'll turn on the tap and flush you into the drains and then you won't be anything anymore but lies and memories. Lies and memories, Light."

Shadows filled the lines carved into Light's face, and L was gripped by a surge of anger. He was angry, angry at last, angry at all that this strange new world had inflicted upon them and angry at Light who had brought this world into L's close quarters, brought it close enough to _matter,_ and the anger roared through all the shrilling and shrieking of terrified thoughts that had been circling, circling, circling, in L's head without stopping for weeks since the Salt Fall on a hundred thousand black wings, and in that moment, L hated him, hated Light for ever giving in to whatever weakness it was that had made him become Kira, whatever it was that had brought him into L's world, had allowed him to slide under L's skin like L's very own crystal salt and made him irreplaceable, something that L couldn't wash away from himself without considerable 'grievous bodily erosion' and pouring himself away with it.

He looked Light in the eye.

 _I wish I didn't have to care._

 _But you only make demands. You never give choices._

"If you don't live, that's what I'll do with you." He was shaking, the wind was cold, his eyes stung, and the lights of Tokyo seem to run together. "Do you understand? You will not be forgiven. There will be nothing of you left to forgive, and I do not forgive anybody who betrays my expectations."

He hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't blinked. He hadn't done anything more but held Light's gaze and made desperate, despairing threats, but in the outpouring of terrible words it all seemed to drain out of him – the maddening uncertainty of the world beneath his feet - and for the first time in weeks the fog of fear, swirling in his head, cleared.

He could breathe and didn't feel breathless.

The Tokyo skyline with its dark reef of towers and tangles of telephone lines was turning pearl grey with dawn.

Light was staring at him with something akin to amusement but also pity and L looked away, because trust Light to spot when there was a crack in L's defences he could take advantage of, and how low had he sounded that he could be pitied by a young man turning into a pillar of salt?

"There," said Light, with a sly smile, as if he had known how L would respond all along, which he hadn't. L had seen his surprise. "Welcome to the new world, Ryuuzaki."

* * *

At some moment that L would never know, Light came to realise that he was unquestionably going to die.

It might have been when the stars faded and the moon turned ghostly for the daylight hours.

It might have been when he turned to L and, this time, said, "I can't die?" and it was a question and L had answered, "We aren't finished yet, are we?"

It might have been when, with a convulsion that he couldn't even hide from L, crystal seized Light's heart and froze it in his chest, but he remained alive, still driven by whatever supernatural power kept the rest of his body moving, and Watari, watching them both on the cameras, messaged L with the suggestion that perhaps _now_ was time that they contacted Light's parents. L told him to do as he saw fit.

It might have been when L complained that sunrise was slow and started looking for distractions.

"You only gave me four reasons for why I shouldn't think you were Kira."

Light huffed and lifted his chin. "I could give you ten more quite easily."

"Easily? I had no idea I was providing Light-kun with such lack of stimulation. Clearly we weren't trying hard enough in our distractions earlier." A thought struck L at the same time as a faint glow of pink and violet began to diffuse across the city. "What about truths?"

"Truths?"

"Neither of us are honest men. I should say that a truth exchange would be a suitably challenging diversion for the both of us."

"I thought you said you'd only stop lying when you had nothing to lose."

"Light-kun twists my words, I said no such thing, but if as you say this is a new world with new possibilities, perhaps I've already lost everything, and there is a need to try something different to keep what is left to me."

"'A truth exchange'," repeated Light, intrigued by the prospect. "How would you know if what I told you were truths?"

L shrugged and the handcuff jangled. "I shouldn't think Light-kun has any significant truths he wishes to hide, unless he decides that it's time to confess that he is Ki – "

" _No,_ Ryuuzaki."

"I thought not."

The sky was red and purple. It was probably going to rain quite heavily sometime in the afternoon. The thought struck him as inexplicably lonely.

L found himself shivering and clearing his throat. "Is this helping?"

"Just keep talking to me. Stop me from thinking about all this."

L nodded and fished a capsule of gum syrup out of his pocket. He peeled open the lid, rubbed his fingers together and blew salt away from under his nails.

Beside him, Light stretched his knees with an arthritic creak. "Watari's calling my parents here, isn't he?"

"They're on their way." L tossed the empty capsule over his shoulder. There was already salt everywhere. They would have to sweep the place afterwards anyway. "Hmm, tell me truthfully then, what do you really think about your father?"

"He'd lay down his life for justice, but every time he pulls a stunt like at Sakura TV, he doesn't even stop to think about how it affects my mum or Sayu – " _Or me._ Light grimaced, his expression sour, "and that part of him, I respect it but I can't stand it. There. True or false, Ryuuzaki?"

"Eighty four percent true," he declared, and as Light spluttered L raised his voice and spoke over him before the urge to curl up and hide away his secrets became too strong, "I was born and raised in Great Britain. By Watari, as a matter of fact. I suppose my upbringing was very unusual from the ordinary man's perspective. For the most part I was responsible for my own education."

"That's...all true." Light was astonished. So was L, but it hadn't been as difficult as he had imagined. Times might have changed more than he realised. Light frowned. "Are you sure it's alright for me to know this?"

"Well, now I can say that if somebody tries to get to me through Watari, they must have been connected to you first, or it was you yourself, and, more to the point, if you aren't Kira, Light, there shouldn't be a problem at all." Light gritted his teeth and L smiled, fished for another truth that should have been easy enough for the two of them. "Tell me about school. How did you cope amongst all that mundanity? You must have been bored out of your mind."

"I was, but there was a window that I could look out of and hope for something better." Light chuckled to himself, the dawn lit his face red and translucent as amber. "No, that's a lie. I wasn't hoping for anything at all really. The world was rotten and I was just waiting to rot away with it because then I thought everything would stop being so disappointing and it would be bearable to live with. Candid enough?"

"I'm not a supervisor marking Light-kun's test papers, but I'd give him ninety two percent, with a one percent bonus for effort, because I know how hard this is for him."

"Oh, that's very generous of you, thanks a lot, Ryuuzaki," said Light coolly, but he looked relieved and a little uncertain, as if his own relief felt alien to him. L thought he maybe knew what that relief was about. He decided not to comment on it. "If we're doing an exchange, what about your real name?" L stiffened and even made of salt Light sensed it, and turned away with a smile. "Pushed my luck, didn't I?"

"Perhaps, now, yes." Time seemed to linger and flake like rust and L suddenly felt loathe to leave it at that. "But, perhaps, another time, things will be different."

"Another time?" Light repeated incredulously then looked back over the city. It and red like a wound but easier on the eyes now that the neon glows were gone. "Yes, alright. Another time. Can I hold you to that? Another time?"

"Yes. Another time."

"I'll look forward to it," said Light, eyes glinting and it occurred to L that they weren't amber anymore, but yellow with a milky violet around the edges of his iris. "So, what can you tell me?"

L thought about it for a long moment, but in the end it was easier than he thought. "I believe I said before that you were my first friend. At the time, it was a – "

"Lie?"

Light was looking a little bit smug, so L sniffed and said, "A half-truth of situational convenience."

"A lie."

"Would Light-kun stop interrupting me? It was a 'necessity of the moment' at the time, but now," L considered his words, because truths were so rarely simple as the words to express them were, and he wanted to get this right, "I've come to mean it now. Whatever I may accuse you of and whatever you may think of me, I consider you a friend, and one who has given me many of my most irritating, most profound, occasionally frustrating but enjoyable memories."

 _There. That was easy enough._ "So for that perhaps I ought to say, 'Thank you'."

The red light of sunrise was playing odd tricks with Light's face. One moment it ran down the shallow tracks in his face and made them glisten red. The next moment it made him look enraged, but with a rage that wasn't directed at L at all, and then finally it seemed to make everything feature of his face light up bright and radiant but soft like a dying flame all at once.

"You were my first friend too."

Crystal glimmered and gleamed.

"Perhaps my only friend."

A dry smile. "What percentage would you say these were true, Ryuuzaki?"

But before L could answer, the sun that they had been waiting to see broke free from the horizon at last. It rose red and gold between the distant towers, and just as L thought it would climb into view a raincloud, grey, blue and bloated, crossed in front of it and completely obscured the rising sun.

And Light burst out laughing, loud and long and with a sound that was strangely free and more open than L had ever heard it.

"Typical!" he gasped, doubling over, wracked with laughter that almost sounded like sobs, and L didn't think it was that funny at all, but it was – oh, it was. "Just typical."

He wheezed and straightened, and then there were real tears running down his face – and they were his last ones, because his eyes were white-blue, dry, dusty, crystallised solid, everything turned to salt at last.

The shock must have shown on L's face. He thought he hid it well. He didn't know what he did, but he must have done something, because the next instant Light was looking at him with those horrible white eyes that weren't eyes at all anymore and reaching out to grip his wrist.

"It's alright to be scared, L," he said. "It's only human, isn't it?"

And L realised he was scared. Yes, he was scared, scared of those white eyes and what they meant, of the grip on his wrist that felt so hard but was brittle enough that a child could snap it apart in a vicious instant, scared of this thing that would replace his friend, of the day ahead with its rain and thunder and an empty seat and silent keyboard, and a case that would forever elude him but he didn't say a thing because there was no use to saying it and his throat had tightened and closed over.

Light went on, shaking his wrist and demanding his attention, always demanding. "And you're human, whatever you try to claim. You get to die human too." He suddenly smiled. "I'm not scared anymore. I wonder why?"

Light's glazed eyes swept over Tokyo, dim and grey, rain in the air, the sun still hidden behind the cloud.

"It's not fair," he laughed, looking straight at L and he wept, closing his eyes. "It's just not fair."

It was suddenly very quiet and very still in the room on the ninth floor.

And L felt, suddenly, very much alone.

He could have removed the cuffs and left him there, but, in the end, he stayed beside the figure at the window until Watari arrived with Yagami Souichirou and Doctor Nanari, because he had sweets in his pockets and the morning sun wasn't so cold and what if Light opened his eyes and there was nobody there to see him do so?

* * *

 **Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!**


	4. Epilogue - Case of Asahi Light

**Disclaimer: Characters are the property of the Death Note franchise. Salt a concept from Shio no Machi by Arikawa Hiro.**

 **Author's Note: Thank you for reading and standing by me.**

* * *

And so L lowered the sheet over Light's face and returned to his desk, resolve hardened at last. He hunched at his desk and typed, one digit at a time.

Watari didn't know what he was doing, but what Watari didn't know wouldn't hurt him and it was preferable that Watari didn't get hurt.

L didn't forget his adversaries, especially the ones that made their business personal, and he had never seen any reason to forgive. Japan was still in lock down, still stifled behind a blanket of international media silence. There were governments out there watching but also a world permitted to turn a cheery, blind eye.

 _How dare they._

 _When L had been made to watch_.

He waited until the taskforce had gone home after another unproductive day and Watari had disappeared to contact Roger before hacking into a major international conference on climate change and population control, attended by journalists, hungry for scandal and tales of tragedy and misfortune, from all around the world.

 _"Greetings."_

He had a feed from a security camera in the conference hall, so he saw the startled faces of the conference attendees snap up to the great 'L' on the screen like chicks to a shadow over a nest.

" _My name is L. You may have heard of me."_

He had plenty of serious cases lined up in his backlog from every attending country for leverage if needed be.

Somehow, he would have them listen.

 _"And I am calling now from the centre of silence, in the memory of a friend."_

* * *

 _Transcript of a presentation from the All Japan Anti-Salt Blight Symposium, October 30th_

 _The case of Asahi Light was extraordinary for a number of reasons, least of all the record twenty three days which his blight crystallisation period extended and the five hours ten minutes continued consciousness within a majority living crystal body._

 _This remarkable feat is likely in part due to Asahi's unique character as seen in his interview footage - highly intelligent and very much aware of this fact, a young person of exceptional gifts, whose loss is a tragedy not only to his nearest and dearest but to the nation of Japan; but more importantly, Asahi had an extraordinary sense of purpose, the like of which I have never seen in a man so young._

 _Now, perhaps his sense of his own importance was rather disproportionate to the reality, but, nevertheless, it was what, we believe, kept him going and the process of blight at bay. He was accompanied by a good friend, a work colleague who became our acquaintance over the course of his ordeal and made it his role to reaffirm with Asahi on a daily basis that they still had unfinished business, playing on Asahi's considerable pride and sense of duty to push him to survive._

 _We have evidence to suggest from other cases that instilling a sense of purpose in the listless young, in such a way - although some might think the attitude of his friend, as present in our record of this case, to be cruel and perhaps too demanding, and perhaps prone to wilful blindness to much that ought to have been addressed during the patient's last days - can greatly help to prolong the blight period until complete crystallisation._

 _I would like to take this time to thank Asahi-kun's family, colleagues and friend for allowing us to record this case. He surprised us, time and time again, with his tenacity, optimism and drive. This record is a testament to Asahi's own extraordinary will to live and to the efforts of those who stood by him, whose constant unwavering companionship served to remind him of the irreplaceability and necessity of his existence._


End file.
